Repent Or Live
by MuddyWolf
Summary: Not your usual aftermath..I think? Hojo survives AVALANCHE's assault due to the Jenova cells, and braves the hostile world, who's not about to forgive him.
1. In Death Indomitable

Legal Stuff: Hojo, Shera, Tifa, Yuffie, and all characters, places, etc. that relate to  
Final Fantasy VII are copyright to Squaresoft. This is a beginner  
and non-profit work. Any similarity to other fanworks is coincidental.  
Hey...I'm back. ^^ I figured I wrote a pregame fic, so I'll write  
a postgame fic. Usual warnings: some characters might be OOC,  
which is accidental, this time. ^^; Yes, I know I'm beginning it in  
Midgar again, but it is the central focus. I didn't mean for this to   
be a sequel to BSOGE, but once again uses Erin's Shera/Lucrecia theory,   
and I suppose it could be a sequel. Thanks, Erin!^^  
started: 8/29/02 finished: 9/2/02 modfied: 9/7/02 modified: 11/4/02  
Rated: PG for mild violence.  
  
To die is mercy. To live is torment.  
  
Repent Or Live  
  
by Blue9Tiger  
  
In the end, it was the Planet's decision. It chose what would   
enter the Lifestream and what would not. But the universe was  
a courtroom. The Planet could be challenged at times...  
  
The only being besides man that would dare oppose it was   
her. Upon decomposition, corpses were absorbed into the soul  
and were gathered into the Lifestream, where they reunited  
with the Planet. During the year of chaos, there  
was one, condemned to remain, though the Planet vied for  
his spirit. She won that battle.   
  
I: In Death Indomitable  
  
A crushed beer can rolled across the debris-ridden dirt,   
smacking against the wall of a building collapsing with decay. The one who  
had kicked it was another innominate nobody wandering the   
remaining Midgar streets. When Meteor fell, Sector 5, 6, 8,  
and Wall Market had been smashed. Those who had been quick  
enough to evacuate swamped the remaining sectors, both from  
below and above the Plate. The latter abandoned their extravagant  
lifestyles for the impoverished bowels of Midgar, sacrificing  
wealth and comfort for their lives. Now, three years later,   
the richest part of the metropolis grew more decrepit each day, with  
Shin-Ra HQ split in two pathetic halves as a testament to the power of Meteor.  
It no longer had the same magnificence and grandeur that it once  
posessed. It was simply another ruined building amongst the others,  
all destroyed by the raining Hell.   
  
The remains of the Sister Ray platform lay among the pulverized buildings.   
It rose above the rest of the wreckage, twisted and contorted   
as if it were gravity's monument. The cannon itself had somehow   
laid intact. Had it not, then Midgar would have been no more. The platform was hardly recognizable: the few plates  
that lay scattered on top of the cliff of steel were the only evidence  
that it ever existed. For three years it remained stagnant:  
not even the rabid scorpion-like creatures that had bred in the slums dared to  
scavenge amongst the dead above the Plate. But the people were   
despairing. They knew who to blame: Shin-Ra, the executives of which  
were dead and the lower SOLDIER units at Junon cursed to be  
alienated. But who to look to for that false illusion called hope? The below-Plate dwellers were used to  
the life, and survived as they had been doing for years. But the  
sheltered ones, the newcomers, that had come down from the Plate now depended on  
AVALANCHE and their associates. They had done well in the first year,  
able to supply them with food. By the second year, they had   
a steady supply coming in from the bordering wilderness. But the third year the people were growing restless.  
The roaming monsters were growing far too numerous, and   
the people demanded means to protect themselves. By the end  
of the third year, AVALANCHE had run out of money. There was one  
choice: salvage the ammunition and the abundance of steel above  
the Plate.  
  
"This is so totally freaky!!!" squeaked a bright-eyed, Wutaian  
girl, gripping her enormous shuriken in her gloved hand. Her  
immaturity didn't seem to match her accuracy with the weapon,  
however. She had two good eyes and an even better arm. "When're  
we goin' back, Tifa? I don't like the looks of this place!" she  
exclaimed to the young woman with the long shock of dark almond  
hair. The third one behind them remained silent, at first glance,  
a tag-along.   
  
Tifa turned a glance to the ninja, and answered determinedly,  
  
"Not until we find what they need." She bent down to the   
contorted heaps of wrecked edifices, and yanked at the pieces,  
throwing them aside in search of usable weapons. "They were  
living in strife under the Shin-Ra. It's our job to give them a chance,"  
Tifa explained, disappearing under the pile of rubble as she   
rooted through the heavy chunks of concrete.  
  
"Aww.....lookin' through junk's boring!" Yuffie groaned, sliding  
to her knees as she looked around the lifeless Plate, scanning  
the crumbling Shin-Ra building and the mountains and mountains of  
trash, that once had been symbols of man's authority over millions of lives, of power,  
of wealth, of money, of...She paused, and gave a devious look. "Maybe there's some  
MATERIA in here!" she shouted with delight sparkling in her eyes.  
"Make room for me, Tifa! I'm divin' in!" Much to Tifa's approval,  
the ninja pretended to roll up her sleeves and licking her upper lip,  
jumped headfirst into the tons of wreckage. Seeing that Yuffie had   
that space covered, the former bartender hiked up a tangled hill of  
broken glass, and picked apart that one, throwing the shards on  
the heightening pile of Yuffie's concrete and metal. Shera went  
to work as well, gathering the pipes and tubing she found,  
the smaller objects she stuffed into her labcoat. The night  
wore on into day. At least, the time indicated it was day.  
It was hard to tell through the heavy Mako pollution that hadn't   
easily dispersed after the Reactors came down. Cid's assistant  
stared at the tormented skies.  
  
"At least..ten, twenty, thirty more years," the brown-eyed woman said---  
what was she again? A scientist? Tifa could never remember. She  
didn't associate herself well with people like that. They were  
beyond her comprehension. She wasn't sure if she WANTED to   
comprehend them. And yet, Shera seemed to be decent. Far too  
submissive in the presence of Cid, but she didn't like to   
judge.   
  
"'Till what?" asked the former bartender, looking up from the mounds of  
glass in front of her.  
  
"Until the pollution clears," the older woman answered, heading  
back below the Plate, her remorseful words hanging in the tainted  
air. "Until the dawn returns."  
  
Tifa watched her go, the flash of white labcoat fading in the  
darkness as Shera left. She then went back to her fruitless  
search, rummaging through the piles of ruin. Yuffie's shouts   
fell dim on her ears as she herself dug deeper into the building  
material. As she removed parts of beams, broken rivets, nails,  
bolts, and screws, she thought she coudld smell something...familiar.  
She took a large whiff of the offensive air.   
  
"Yuffie!!" she shouted, jamming her fist amidst the wreckage.  
Soft. Flesh. It moved. Something...alive down there? "Yuffie!" she  
called again, leaning her head down against the glass in order to   
reach farther. Her Crystal Glove wrapped around a...limb.   
  
"What!?" returned the girl, her boots clomping on the rubble  
as she made her way up the incline towards Tifa. She bent down at the knees to  
peer into the hole that Tifa had made in the heap, but couldn't see anyhting beyond Tifa's brown  
locks. "Whaj'd ya call me for?! I was THIS close to gettin' the  
mother lode!" She drew her face into a pout.   
  
"I found..something..I think.." She felt the limb shudder, quiver,  
and finally thrash. "It's alive." At that, the thief/ninja cocked  
her head, squirm, stick her tongue out, before she made a disgusted  
noise and jumped up and down, squealing,   
  
"Lemme see!"  
  
"Hold on...almost got----"  
  
Tifa never got to finish. Whatever was down there came up on its  
own, shooting up to full view. Both AVALANCHE members screamed at  
the top of their lungs, the elder in shock and the younger in terror.  
The monster they had unleashed hovered over them, its disfigured  
shadow hovering over the two females. It raised its faceless head to the   
dark heavens, oozing thick blood from a hideous gash that had been   
torn through its center. Bullet holes covered its chest, and the  
rip in its tail where a spear had been thrusted with deadly   
accuracy was visible to the AVALANCHE members' widened eyes. But  
that wasn't the shocker. It was alive. It was living. It  
was..there. Back bent and limbs on the verge of falling out of  
their sockets and sagging from blood loss, clinging to life by the blade at the end of his  
hideous tentacle, but ALIVE. "I can't believe it..." Tifa exclaimed, her fists moving to her   
face as she readied to the kill the monster...for a second time.  
"Professor Hojo..."  
  
The Start 


	2. The Fourth Form

Legal Stuff: Hojo, Tifa, Barret, Yuffie, and all other characters  
pertaining to Final Fantasy VII are copyright to Squaresoft.  
This is beginner and nonprofit. Any similarities in plot to   
other fanworks are coincidental.   
Hey again! OOC is accidental this time.  
started: 9/2/02 finished: 9/3/02 modified: 9/7/02  
Rated: PG for mild violence and profanity.  
  
Repent Or Live  
  
by Blue9Tiger  
  
II: The Fourth Form  
  
The fighter didn't know whether it was a reflex or an advance,  
but Hojo came closer. And the two women responded swiftly, Tifa  
lashing out with her fists, and Yuffie with her Crystal Cross.   
The weapons rained hard on the monster's weakened body, sending him  
crashing into the glass mound, sending the shards tumbling downward  
and shattering on the bed of steel.   
  
"Did he kick?" asked Yuffie, letting her grip loosen on her   
enormous shuriken, but still maintaining a ready stance. The  
smashing of glass and a flash of bloody yellow and grey was  
the answer. Tifa readied another physical blow while Yuffie  
checked the Materia slots on the Crystal Cross. Fire3...perfect  
for slime like him. With a jaw set in energetic determination,  
the ninja focused on the Materia in her weapon, and brandished  
it at the enemy. "Dissect THIS, greasy specimen guy!" An explosive blast of  
hot flame that burned with the intensity of a sun flare engulfed the monster, who had slowed further still, more  
of Jenova's blood leaking from the wounds in his body, which the  
burns didn't help. He began to sag even more, his eyeless   
visage turned towards the metal. He could feel the dulling pain  
of the blows those two simpletons dealt as he drew nearer to death,  
a death he had supposed to have met long ago.  
  
His still-functional mind churned within his battered body.   
  
Impossible...the Lifestream should have assimilated me,  
according to all natural laws and basic principles...unless..  
Jenova has erected a barrier that would prevent entry to  
the Lifestream....no, no..completely illogical...she was vaporized.  
Consequently, I would be dead as well...but I'm...not.  
  
I am here. They killed me, but you...  
  
Jenova? How is it possible? It contradicts all scientific rationale...  
It's not...supposed to BE!  
  
..Are my final refuge. You live, I live. Live...  
They are trying to kill me. Kill them.  
  
You can't control me, Jenova...I am a..scientist..My intellect  
surpasses your infantile whims..your obsession with indiscriminate  
destruction...you are the mad one, not I...  
  
These humans want to destroy me.   
They want to destroy you.   
  
It's useless to delay..the inevitable with self-preservation..  
  
Though I have perpetuated your wretched life, you remain  
ungrateful. Very well, puppet.  
  
Empty.  
  
Kill them.  
  
The creature obeyed, its inhuman scream rending the air as  
it beat its tail against the enemy humans, lashing out with the  
broad end of the limb, bruising Tifa and bringing down the sharp end, slicing Yuffie's leg open,  
a trickle of blood crawling down the skin. It lunged again,  
striking the enemy repeatedly, the blows so frequent that there was  
no room for the other to strike back. It beat them across the Plate,  
draining their energy, exhausting their strength, slowly clipping at  
their health. It had them backed up to the edge of the Plate when a giant projectile shot right through its chest,  
Jenova's blood spurting out of the yawning cavity, splattering on   
the tangle of metal. It crumpled under the impact, falling dead. Tifa  
shielded her head against the next blow, but nothing came down. Gasping  
for air, she propped herself up with her hands  
and raised her eyes to confirm who fired. The AVALANCHE  
leader clambered over the swamp of debris, his dark brown head laced with  
sweat.  
  
"Damn! 'Tought we sacked 'dat sucka 'fore we trashed  
'dat one-winged shit!" Barret shouted, smoke still pouring from  
the barrel of his Solid Bazooka. Tifa focused on her mastered   
Cure3, and enveloped both her and a sprawled-out Yuffie with a   
shimmering restorative aura, the energy of the Planet  
flowing through her and closing their wounds. Then she turned to  
Barret, affirming,  
  
"I thought he was dead, too.." She stared at the corpse,  
imperceptibly shivering. "But it's taken care of." She thanked  
Barret gratefully before returning to her search, and motioned to  
Yuffie with her hand, who was frozen in shock. "Yuffie, what's the matter?"  
  
"Don't look now---!" she yelped, peeking out of the cracks  
between her fingers. Tifa and Barret spun around. What they  
saw shocked them to the core.   
  
It started to rise off of the bloody steel, Jenova's blood bubbling  
around it. Suddenly it was thrown to the ground, face-flat in the bed of steel. Her cruel sculpting had  
begun. The deformities of the monster grew as its flesh twisted, expanding and decreasing size, rolling over  
itself, enlargening, reshaping...into a new abomination. Something  
was wrong about this. It wasn't supposed to survive past this  
point. Barret's bullets should have sent it to the Lifestream.  
Instead it changed, transformed into an unrecognizable being  
of hideousness. The lesser stages Lifeform and Helletic implied  
that the creature was derived from a human. But this final  
push by Jenova, that forced her host's systems to the limit  
as her cells ransacked its body, was a mutation completely removed from Jenova. Through the lesser mutations,  
one thing remained prominent: its arms. Its arms, together with   
the hands or handlike projections, enabled it to reshape human beings into  
twisted and deformed monstrosity. But its arms shrivelled, and did not  
reform, leaving it with no way to alter anything but by biting it,  
in the way of the common animal. As for the skull, it warped and grew  
with the materializing bone, hardening into an animal skull that was wrapped  
by the thickening hide. The short tail grew longer,   
wider, and tentacles burst through its sides, a haunting reminder  
of the being who ravaged him. At its front appeared   
the semblance of a face, so distorted and misshapen that   
that could be contested. The roof of its gaping mouth was punctured by  
bestial fangs, broader and sharper than they had been in the Helletic form. Its flesh grew more layers, folding   
on top of each other to create a protective covering, but growing  
over his cartiliginous skeleton which shattered and reformed into a severely curved vertebrae,  
manifesting the one sign of age that Jenova couldn't conceal.   
And his eyes no longer were aglow with Mako, but...  
  
Jenova.   
  
"When 'dat freak 'gonna give up?!" yelled Barret as he  
let off the shells, every one of them bouncing off  
the warping flesh or tearing straight through it. Tifa and Yuffie prepared to attack again:  
the shells, to their horror, had no effect. The deafening boom of the weapon  
grew steadily faster as Barret reloaded with more impatience.  
And all the while, the monster screamed as it continued to transform,  
the horrible blend of a wail and screech that resounded  
through the Plate. Its hideous form was half-hidden by   
spreading smoke, and it screamed as the bullets landed,  
but it drew no blood.   
"'Dis is shit!" Barret cursed through grated teeth as  
he found his ammunition spent, hearing a sharp click   
in the place of the soothing thunder of a projectile. Tifa  
advanced slightly, sweeping her hair out of her face as she  
remarked,  
  
"There's got to be some way.."  
  
The monster's cry started to die down as the Jenova-triggered  
surge inside his systems lessened from a ripping pain to   
a persistent numbness. They say that those who are blind are   
fortunate not to see the world around them. But his eyes were  
opened.   
  
He saw a giant shuriken strike his back. Blood leaked out of the  
slit, but clotted rapidly. Jenova had left him again for the time  
being. Left him alone with these scrutinizing eyes on him...  
  
He was always one to scrutinize. But for him to be the one who  
was scrutinized, to be examined, to have the gaze of so many  
on him, disgusted, appalled...or fearful. Not fearful because  
of his mental prowess, his human capabilities, fearful of what  
he could do to them with his medical instruments, but fearful  
because he was...  
  
A monster.   
  
Tifa pulled out a piece of Materia from her shorts pocket, replacing the one in her Crystal Glove  
with another one. "This might do it," she resolved, inserting it into  
the slot and concentrating. Yuffie and Barret prepared to strike,  
but the Sleep attack looked like it was taking effect, the abomination  
growing more sluggish, drowsy. And then it collapsed, sound asleep,  
its hulking body heaving as it respired. The three AVALANCHE members  
approached it with marked caution, expecting any moment that it would  
spring up and attack them.  
"We can't kill it, but we can't leave it alone," she resolved.   
  
"So what we 'gonna do?" Barret asked, folding his huge arms   
over his muscled chest.  
  
"Lets get it to Shera. She'll know what to do."  
  
The End...for now. 


	3. Change and Adjustment

Legal Stuff: Hojo, Shera, Elena, Reno, Rude, and all characters and places pertaining  
to Final Fantasy VII are copyright to Squaresoft. This is beginner  
and nonprofit, any similarity in plot to any other fanwork is  
coincidental.   
Hi! This "0512" is getting to be a running gag. Which, by the  
way, is also property of Squaresoft. Erin, I borrowed your name (you'll  
see what I mean), so please don't kill me! Sorry if characters are  
OOC. Also, this may look rushed to you. It actually wasn't. ^^; I'm  
experimenting with concise writing. Slower writing sometimes  
becomes roundabout and the focus is lost. If you're feeling generous,  
drop me your input on this "faster" style.  
started: 9/3/02 finished: 9/3/02 modified: 9/4/02  
Rated: PG for mild violence and very mild profanity.   
  
Repent Or Live  
  
by Blue9Tiger  
  
Shera was always precise. Though she had spent many years of her  
life in Rocket Town, living in the shadow of the decrepit Shin-Ra  
026, her days spent by fixing tea for the chronic smoker,   
she was adept with needles. The dexterity with which she handled  
them and other medical tools even stunned the Captain from time to time.  
She never told him...or anyone, for that matter, where she had  
acquired those skills. Not that they wanted to know. They simply  
accepted the fact that she happened to be a mechanic and a  
scientist.  
  
She had been obtaining quite a collection of specimens recently.  
Aside from aiding the Midgar denizens by amassing weapons, she  
had constructed a tiny laboratory at the edge of Sector 1. The Captain   
did comment it looked weird, with a few choice words added. That  
Cid...his language never ceased to be colorful. She had fashioned it  
with Nibelheim architecture in mind, and it served its purpose:  
housing a number of small slum animals which she contented herself  
to study.  
  
But this one...  
  
The mild-mannered woman headed to the back of the cramped room,  
a syringe in her hand. She carefully approached the enormous hulk  
with a flat expression. The glass tube was filled with a bright crimson dye,  
like blood. Shera trembled. She hated anything that reminded her  
of blood, but a bright dye was necessary to identify the subject  
in case it escaped.   
  
She approached the creature with syringe in hand, with a tinge  
of pity for the specimen. She didn't have any large containment   
tubes, and had to resort to a cage. And then there was..the chain.  
AVALANCHE was unusually fervent about this one, and they practically  
had ordered her to chain it to the bars. That she did, finding amongst the heaps of ruin a   
manacle large enough for its neck and a chain long enough  
to allow it movement while keeping it at bay, though   
unwillingly. But she wasn't about to argue with years of combat   
experience.   
  
Shoving all reservations aside, she pushed the needle under   
the folds of skin, the red dye flowing into the one letter and  
four numbers she had meticulously carved into its hide. She met with  
resistance, a sharp wail emitting from it before it lunged foward,  
yanked on its chain in the process, and felt the shackle  
dig into its throat as it was jerked backwards. Shera yelped, her  
concentration broken. Shooting a stern look at the specimen,  
that returned what was almost a stare of cold defiance, she  
inserted the point of the needle again and finished her work.  
  
III: Change and Adjustment  
  
H0512.  
  
Of all the acrid irony.   
  
It wasn't his old specimen guarding the sixty-seventh and  
eighth floors. No...it was him. His own self. Given a number for  
the sole purpose of identification. He wouldn't have minded it  
as much if it hadn't been a number he had contrived himself.  
But it was of his own invention, bred from the reaches of his   
fragmented sanity.  
  
It jumped off of his bare semblance of skin at his skewed eyes. She  
had tattooed it adjacent to his jaw, as he had no legs or arms. Its  
positioning had made the red mark visible to not only anyone who  
was insipid enough to stare at what was inside the cage, but to himself.  
Was this supposed to be some kind of torment? Her means of satisfying  
her own sadism? Yes..that must have been it. But...there was   
nothing sadistic about that scientist. More of..familiar. Still, hee   
couldn't see her clearly: Shera had laid the bars criss-cross, barring  
his sight of everything except the murkiness of the room.  
  
That and the raw kill, a Kalm Fang, in the middle of the cage. It had been  
sitting there for a day now, untouched.   
  
What impudence...to make a weak assumption that I'm a   
carnivore based on my teeth.  
  
But it looked tempting, especially to one who hadn't eaten in  
three years.   
  
With evident hesitancy, he crawled towards the Kalm Fang, propelling  
himself foward with his tentacled tail, feeling the weight of the   
shackle on his neck as he neared the tempting nourishment. And then,  
he wrapped his jaws around the meat, the fur and bones leaving a   
revolting taste in his mouth. It wasn't until he was forcing a   
kidney down his digestive tract that the realization hit him,  
bringing on a sudden nausea.   
  
He was enjoying it.  
  
--------  
Dawn broke over the Junon cannons, the rising sun casting beams  
of orange light on the SOLDIERs buffing their broad surface, like so many ants  
busying themselves about the hill. Their presence was evidence  
enough that the Shin-Ra artilery was still operational. There  
was no trace of their presence in Midgar: virtually the entire city  
had been cut off from the outside world since Meteor. But everywhere  
else, especially in Junon, where their numbers were most concentrated, they had amassed power, and lots of it.  
Rude had managed to obtain a copy of Hojo's Reactor blueprints. A design  
that had already existed, what was left was the construction, with  
a few modifications made that would keep upper Junon free of the by-product  
and irrigate it into the lower half. Keep the citizens happy and healthy, they're  
more productive, economy skyrockets. That took care of the crime rate  
and chance of riot and insurrection. And if there was any, those  
responsible were dragged into lower Junon. Quick and simple.  
  
Thus, the military base burst into a sprawling metropolis, reaching   
as far north as the deserted Fort Condor. It was a venerable  
utopia, in the midst of the barren eastern continent. But no one  
outside of it had ever seen it. Junon was isolated by both a broad mountain range and a localized focus. Until  
now, those in power had concentrated on domestic affairs. But the  
chaotic time where they strove for self-sufficiency had passed. It  
was time to look outward.  
-------  
A set of lean fingers drummed on the oval-shaped table, the tips  
hitting the polished grains in impatience. Man...things were such  
a drag since Meteor fell. Drone, drone, drone. Talk, talk, talk.  
It surprised him that the executives, especially the older ones,  
didn't buy the farm out of sheer boredom.  
  
"Midgar, Wutai, Icicle, Nibelheim, Corel, Cosmo, Bone,   
Gongaga, Kalm---" a firm female voice shook him from his idle   
state, bringing her eyes level with his, upon which she stood  
up from her chair, pounding her fist on the tabletop. It was  
a light noise, but stood out enough to jerk all of the executives  
to full alertness. "I don't know what you think this is, but it's  
NOT one of your low-class pubs!" She waved an accusing finger  
at the man sitting boredly in the chair opposite her, his legs  
spread in a large stance as he stared with defiance at the woman.  
"REYNOLD!" the latter screamed with enough wrath to make   
Cerberus cower, "Don't let me catch you drinking again!"  
  
He missed it when they were Turks. Sure, the work was hard and  
mostly without rewards, all for their stupid, fat president and  
later, for his pretty-boy son, but it beat listening to Elena  
drawl about company policy. "We pretty much own this city, so   
we need to make decisions on its behalf," she answered one of  
the clueless executives, who had been former fellow Turks.  
  
TALKING like those big-headed jackasses. You started out like  
us. 'Gonna up and change just like that?   
  
"Now then," she stated with her composure regained, completing a half-circle around the table,  
spinning clockwise, and stretching a map of the Planet out onto  
its spotless surface. The executives crowded around the map as  
Elena smoothed it with her hand, then swept her finger across  
the continents. "We'll hit all of these towns. The Turks'll  
take their SOLDIER units and re-establish links with these points.  
Then we can build transportation systems regardless if they want  
to trade or not---"  
  
"If they don't want to trade..." Rude broke in. "Do we..?"  
He socked his palm with the knuckles of his large hand. That was enough   
to complete the unfinished question. Elena shot him an incredulous glare. "This isn't the Wutaian war,  
Rudolph." He visibly flinched under the stinging remark. "We're the big wigs of Shin-Ra  
Electric Company, and we're to conduct ourselves peaceably like  
the honest gentlepeople we are." She smiled, affirming Shin-Ra's  
good attentions to any possible doubters, before   
concluding, "Any questions?"  
  
"Miss Elena, these towns--" One executive spoke up, "--if you can  
call them towns, might have been smashed by Meteor. In fact, Junon  
might be the only life on the Planet."  
  
"We don't know that," she answered, looking back down at the map.  
The executive acknowledged what she said, the shadow of dubiousness  
thickly spread on his face. "Any more questions?"  
  
I got one. Go to hell? Reno thought bitterly as Elena dismissed  
them. They filed out of the room noisily, leaving the imprints of  
their shoes in the plush pastel yellow carpet, at which Elena was greatly annoyed,  
but it couldn't be helped. The last ones to leave were Reno and  
Rude, the former moody and the latter biting his tongue so hard  
it started to bleed. Before the older one passed through the doorway,  
Elena stopped him by grabbing his arm. Though she was much smaller  
than him in stature, he didn't question her authority. He was  
content to let the triumvirate crumble and become an absolute  
monarchy. "Junon's a monster-free city." Rude nodded, taking in  
the information with steadfast silence. "I want all our trading partners to enjoy the   
same thing. So, clean out the towns," she ordered, pushing open the  
furnished hardwood doors, shutting them behind the former Turks.  
They had scarcely made it to the elevator when the doors banged  
open again. "Don't get yourselves killed!"  
  
It made Reno boil. He knew what that meant. Order around  
the Turks to do the grunt work while they sat back and got  
stoned on champagne. Champagne?! He wanted BEER. It was the only  
thing he and Rude ever drank, and he wasn't about to get swank  
and extravagant now. As the two men sauntered into the elevator   
and rode down, he ripped off his tie, an article of clothing  
Elena had forced him to wear, pushed his wild hair back, and  
said to Rude in his laid-back manner,  
  
"We're takin' the Turks up to Midgar."  
  
To be continued... 


	4. Ending Isolation

Legal Stuff: Nanaki, Reno, Rude, Vincent, Cloud, Cait Sith 2, and all characters, places,  
and objects pertaining to Final Fantasy VII are copyright to   
Squaresoft. This is beginner and nonprofit, and any similarities  
to other fanworks are coincidental. Any complaints notify me @   
Blue9Tiger@aol.com.  
Hi! OOC is unintentional this time. No Vincent or Cloud-bashing here,   
unfortunately. At least...for now. Sorry for the rapid switch  
of gears in this chapter. It'll make sense eventually. HAHAHAA! And now, read  
or enjoy. Or not. ^^;  
started: 9/4/02 finished: 9/4/02 modified: 9/4/02  
Rated: G  
  
An animal howl carried long and low through the lowlands of  
Gongaga. The shadow on the plateau broke for the other side and  
released another howl, that swept into Corel and all of its   
territories. It bounded off of the edge, sprinting north for the   
canyons, running against the frantic tide of the animals that were fleeing  
the open ground they had been feeding on. The stubborn alphas of the herds or  
packs at first refused to move, but when they saw who the messenger  
was, they heeded the order. This was no lowly animal, but the  
former protector of Cosmo Canyon, and in result of the turmoil  
that had been unleashed from the Nibel Reactor upon Meteor's fall,  
guardian of the entire western continent.  
  
The distance between Gongaga and his own land was short, but though he was   
pushing his lung capacity, the dire gravity of the message made him  
believe that he wasn't running fast enough. It hadn't happened   
since that first day after Meteor. Human shrieks, half the Canyon  
dead, and their slayers razing Cosmo's scientific equipment  
and profaning the sacred fire. They interbred with the survivors,  
and their hybrid numbers swelled, creating a virtual army of killers.  
Someone had to protect them, those who had lived. They had lived through   
Meteor only to be struck down by hell's brood.  
  
He had taken a solemn oath to guard the humans and native monsters  
from that day onward. Remembering that oath sent a surge of strength through him,  
sending the blood coursing through his veins that set the   
untamed beast in his soul aflame, rendering his howl that of   
a dozen of his kind, echoing through his homeland, the Nibel plains,  
the mountains, from which the threat sprang, and to the Rocket  
valley miles away from where the rock on which he stood. It was  
now up to them to heed the warning he just gave...  
  
...Of the Mako Monsters.  
  
Repent Or Live  
  
by Blue9Tiger  
  
IV: Ending Isolation  
  
The clouded skies above the eastern continent were flooded with  
helicopters bearing the Shin-Ra insignia. They diverged from Junon,  
leaving its safety to establish economic relations with the cities...  
  
If there were still any.   
  
Reno stared out through the window and saw a naked Planet.   
It didn't bother him in particular, used to walking on manmade  
roads and when on natural ground, either too drunk or too engaged in   
rolling a few heads to pay much attention to the plants. Now that   
they were gone, though, he almost missed them. Almost..  
  
Rude was stoic as usual. His impassiveness rubbed off on the  
Turks in the backseat, as they hadn't said a word since they left.  
Then again, they were more experienced Turks, who knew when to   
keep their mouths shut. Either that or they were mute.  
  
They were crossing over the mountains, made partially visible  
through a layer of opaque fog. Where it was thinnest it dispersed, revealing the bald  
peak of the mountain. Nothing new, there. Colliding with the mountains  
was the swamp. What the...? No swamp. Just a heap of entwined Zolom  
skeletons. Funny that this was the only body of water that dried  
up. Not willing to sift through those details better left to   
someone who gave a damn about them, he leaned back in the  
passenger seat, popped open a can of beer, and waited for the  
chopper to reach Midgar.   
-------   
A flock of Thunderbirds soared over the turbulent ocean. Their  
raucous squawk made them easy targets for predators that were bold  
enough to hunt in the open during an attack. The fowl were spawned  
from the rugged Wutaian mountains, and were brash hunters themselves.  
One of the small silk-spinning animals scurried across the shoreline. With a  
fearsome screech, the Thunderbirds dove in for the kill, their  
beaks open and eyes expectant as they furled their wings. They caught   
the animal in their talons, each one shoving the other to take  
posession of it, and in their confusion, the bullet exited.  
  
The holder of the gun blew the residual smoke from the top of  
the barrel and, giving it a twirl in the manner of western  
gunslingers hailing from a distant time, holstered it at his  
side. He approached the now-dead birds with a nearly ethereal  
gait, in permanent slow-motion, though he could run if the situation  
required. He bent at the waist, long strands of sable hair spilling  
over his face, as pale as a specter, stiff and inflexible as he  
picked up the dead birds, and made his way towards a dim fire at  
the edge of the island.  
------  
Coarse brown dropped off of the bird as the blade of the  
Apocalypse sheared its feathers. He had done it so many times  
that he didn't have to ask Vincent what they were having for a  
meal: he already knew the answer. Unfortunately for them,  
Thunderbirds were the only edible animals on Wutai's land.  
And since all imports to Wutai came to a halt on that day, and  
the rest of the animals were poisonous or lived so close to  
the toxic ones that it was impossible to differentiate, Thunderbirds  
were the only thing they could expect to eat.  
  
Sometimes Cloud wondered if the other members of AVALANCHE   
were still alive. He would ask Vincent about it, but would seldom  
get an answer. The other entertained himself by staring, staring  
out into the distance with his not-quite Mako eyes. Eventually he  
gave up talking to him at all, and they carried out their day-to-day  
existence without a word to each other. Occasionally Cloud would  
wonder what happened to Vincent to make him so dead, but for some  
inexplicable reason that made him think of Jenova. Then the memories would take advantage of his  
disquieted mind and swim though his brain again, leaving  
him in a hapless state of paranoia before Vincent woke him with  
a word or two, and silence would ensue again.  
  
Red flames swayed and jumped at the spit on which the  
Thunderbird was being roasted. The crackle of the fire was  
the only thing that intermittently broke the prolonged silence.  
Cloud let his gaze wander to the third person in their party,  
who was also silent. Cait Sith 2 had been lying there for all  
this time, not saying a word. That bothered him, because that  
cat-and Mog always had something to say. But the feline lay  
silent, his stuffed Mog below his paws leaning beside the fire,  
as still as death.  
  
He was dead, Vincent resolved. Reeve was dead. Shin-Ra was  
dead. Sephiroth was dead. Everyone was dead. Everyone except for him, Cloud, and  
the Wutaians.  
  
He thought they were alone. But so did anyone who were isolated  
by a body of water. He and the ex-SOLDIER had found and retained a simple but  
plentiful lifestyle. They never would have believed that they'd  
be shaken by a rude awakening.   
  
To be continued... 


	5. Awaken

Legal Stuff: Hojo, Cid, Nanaki, Shera, Tifa, Yuffie, SOLDIERs, Barret, Vincent, Cloud, Reno, Rude, and all characters, places, and objects  
pertaining to Final Fantasy VII are copyright to Squaresoft.  
This is beginner and nonprofit. Any simliarity to other fanworks  
is coincidental.  
Hi! Hm..whenever I add Cid, the rating jumps. ^^; The last reviewer was confused?   
I was revealing what happened to the characters separately. OO That made no sense.  
Anyway, I hope it makes sense now.  
started: 9/4/02 finished: 9/7/02 modified: 9/7/02  
Rated: PG-13 for profanity.  
  
Repent Or Live  
  
by Blue9Tiger  
  
V: Awaken  
  
A bang rattled the thin door. No answer. Another one, accompanied  
by uncouth cursing. The banging grew louder, this time in rapid  
succession. The frequency of the swearing grew along with it.  
A click of a dislodged bolt, a final wham and the door flew open, hitting the adjacent wall  
hard enough to make the whole lab shake. The force loosed  
a glass container from one of the shelves, which broke on the  
floor, sending broken glass and stuff he'd rather not know the  
name of onto the floor.   
  
"Fuck."  
  
He set down a long weapon of some sort against the wall and took a long stride over the spill, only to smack into  
the broken lightbulb on the ceiling. "We don't have friggin'  
power! Whaddoes she need goddamn bulbs for?!" He held his cut head with one hand while he stuffed  
his other one in his pocket to light up. As he ingested the tar, nicotine, and the other toxins that   
the cigarette consisted of, he looked up. Packed along every inch of the tables and shelves were   
glass cylinders or metal cages, the crawly things inside them staring out at him with curiosity. Indeed,   
they hadn't seen any human besides Shera for ages. "Quit damn lookin' at me that way!" he growled with  
evident uneasiness. Machines, engines, motors, they were his passion. But as for living organisms,  
things that could crawl into your hair and slobber all over you or try and bite your head off, he didn't   
really go for that. "Shit, Shera.." he growled, rummaging for a set of keys that Shera gave him, which didn't   
include the key to the lab door. "Always findin' new ways to screw me over. Where the helld'd ya damn have to go so fast?!" The keys jangled as he yanked  
them out of his right pocket, and he tromped towards the back of the room. He didn't know exactly which  
one Shera wanted him to walk, but he figured it was the one in the biggest cage. With an aggravated grunt  
he took the largest key and jammed it into the lock, the barred door  
swaying open. His jaw dropped, the cigarette dropping onto the   
overlapping floorboards and rolling out of his reach. He gaped at  
it for a good minute and a half, took a step back, and started  
laughing out of sheer disbelief. Then he looked at it again with wire-thin tranquility and   
slapped his knee. "Take my manhood and send it upstream."He shook his head with a yellow smile of magma under pressure.   
"For the love of Ifrit's cock--" Boom. He exploded, spurting out verbal lava.  
"HOW THE HOLY BLEEDIN' HELL AM I'GONNA WALK THIS SHITFUCK?!?!"  
  
Apalled? That was putting it lightly. Cid was utterly repulsed.  
He made a move to grab it, but recoiled, as it responded to his   
movement, slowly crawling out of the cage on its stomach. The pilot  
grimaced. Despite all his toughness, he could handle motor oil,  
fuel, rust, name it and he'd take it lightly. But a tentacled,  
frothing, drooling, scorpion-tailed, possibly man-eating, fanged  
freak show secreting a colored mucus? Shera had the wrong man.   
His first impulse was to shove it back into the cage and slam the  
door, but he wasn't touching that thing, even with his gloves.  
It wasn't anything he hadn't seen before in the Gelinka, but  
his only interaction with them was a spear in the gut. Spear..  
right! He had a spear. Jumping backwards, he landed in front of  
the door and grabbed his Partisan. All the while the monster  
stared at him with cold defiance and waited for the pilot to move.  
Cid was doing the same thing, holding his weapon at the ready.  
When he didn't lunge, it wriggled foward, advancing as far as  
the chain would let it. The persistent clatter gave Cid an idea.  
"Fuck it," he said as he sprang up and over the monster's open  
jaws, and drove the spearhead into the steel links, snapping the  
chain and freeing the monster, that crawled out of the doorway.  
Cid stared after it for a while, noticing something familiar about  
the way it moved: slippery, oily movements, and yet erratic and  
jerky as if a demon posessed it, found a more befitting soul to   
trap, and fled. But he didn't dwell on the oddity long: the creature was gone.  
"Shera, ya bitch," Cid snarled as he lit another cigarette before   
chasing after the green-and-yellow freak.  
------  
Moments after the howl died, hell arrived.  
  
The crimson beast exhaled tension and anxiety from his nostrils. He was a seasoned  
warrior, but they were far more numerous than they had been. And they were converging  
under the ledge. They clawed viciously at the rock, trying to grasp the edge  
and attack the red animal. Filled with unbound hate, the Mako monsters were   
whirlwinds, slashing with their deformed claws, releasing their pent rage, taking   
vengeance on the world with their blood-swathed justice.   
  
Nanaki met the mutated fury with equal rage. He was born amongst humans, but  
all around him was wilderness, and it raged within him as an unquenchable fire. He fought with   
unmatched ferocity, biting, slashing, crashing into the deformed enemies with the weight of  
his body. They were unarmed, and fell easily, but the others swamped him with revenge on  
their screaming minds, and he went down hard on his back.  
  
But he was only fifty-one. No one except the Planet would bring down Red XIII that early.  
  
With a ferocious blend of roar and howl, he righted himself, lunging into the  
enemy monster and snapping its neck with his lean jaws. It made no outcry, but died  
quickly. During the split second that was available between the last attack and the next one,  
he caught a glimpse of the  
shoreline. The sea...  
  
He bounded off the ledge, pursued by a wave of Mako monsters. He kept his one  
yellow eye foward, focused on the water, isolating himself from the grass below  
his paws, the air he was breathing: everything, except for the water lapping at  
the shoreline, growing close fast. The terrible screech behind him grew distant,   
so removed from him that he heard them no longer. Alone there was the shore. The water. The sea.  
  
Nanaki dove for the shallows, and a sting of cold broke over his body. He  
instinctively shook his coat free of the abiotic leeches, but a few steps and the water  
was up to his neck. The monstrous wave lunged for him, one slashing its crooked  
claws against his left hind leg. It gouged a red streak down the upper thigh,  
blood dripping into the ocean. The pain that wasn't lessened by  
the water, but that didn't matter right now. The monster now wrapped around his tail,  
he inhaled, and forged ahead into the deep water.   
  
Now it was only a matter of who drowned first.  
---------  
Hojo was starting to hate the chain.   
  
Is walking such an issue that he couldn't leave me in my solitude? I'm in no need of  
exercise. What kind of scientist entrusts his laboratory  
rat to one not of his own profession?  
  
Labrat...why did it only dawn on him now? Perhaps because he was  
one before. Perhaps on the sixty-seventh and eighth floors he spent  
so much time with his specimens that when he was caged, he felt as  
if he was looking from the outside in. But in reality, it was the  
opposite.   
  
To be disillusioned about onself was a great torment.  
  
Not imprisoned in Shera's cage..no, that didn't open his   
eyes. But the people..the human beings..he was analytical  
to a fault, and just by glancing he could read the utter   
repulsion in their faces, the way they hurried away into their dark corners where  
they couldn't see the monster.   
  
Imprisonment was synonymous with death. He had been taken from  
its grasp and flung out into life, where he couldn't hide,  
hide from the humans that loathed..beasts like him.   
  
While in the cage, Hojo hadn't bothered to examine himself.  
He had seen the red mark. That alone served to torment his otherwise  
undisturbed thoughts. It further reminded him, not what, but who, he had been. And he still was.  
He was Professor Hojo, the top Shin-Ra scientist. Why couldn't those  
numb-minded Midgar dwellers see it?   
  
This bestiality is a poorly-contrived mask. A mind of logic and reason  
is what the mask hides. They simply.....fail to see. Their optic nerves  
must be weakened by disuse in the slums. Yes, that's it. That is the most logical--  
  
His thought train was derailed when Cid jerked the chain in another direction to avoid ramming into a pitifully  
small resevoir. Then he shifted his hand towards the spearhead to have more control of the Partisan, and walked in another direction, bringing both him  
and...whatever that thing was out of earshot of some natives from  
Sector 3 that were exchanging small talk.  
  
"So AVALANCHE iced him?" the first one asked, his hairy arms folded   
over his equally hairy chest, which was adorned with various tattoos   
with intimidating designs. The second one looked like he had been down in Corel   
for as many years as he could count. If he wasn't that good of a Chocobo  
jockey, he could've been there longer.   
  
"Yep, and damn good, too. Ya know he was fucking with the Mako  
cannon?"  
  
Both men's belts were weighed down in firearms, the sign   
of a weathered Midgar man who had amassed enough street savvy  
to take the spoils and keep them long enough to kill the would-be thief  
that would stab them for it in a heartbeat.   
  
"No shit, man? Who told ya that?"  
  
"Kisaragi babe. She said it'd blow up Midgar. Shit, if that old fuck  
was livin' still," Zealously he patted his copper knuckles,  
having a scathing hatred for anyone even loosely associated with Shin-Ra. "I'd knock the shit 'outta him. Same goes for  
anyone down here that got a big-ass brain."  
  
"'Gotta hate scientists, dude."  
  
"Yeah."   
  
He rolled a wad of spit in his mouth and fired it at the rim of a  
beer can, knocking it a good seven feet towards the ever-growing  
human mass, who crunched it beneath soleless shoes. About half of them  
had weapons. It seemed as if AVALANCHE was doing their job.   
But the other clamored for them, afraid of the non-humans.  
Barret jogged into view, threw some of the citizens a stock  
of ammunition, and running into the middle shack, which served as AVALANCHE's   
headquarters.  
  
"Don't this sector got one?"  
  
"Yes, that's me," a female voice broke in, making herself known  
as she walked towards the small resevoir. Sliding a pencil  
from behind her ear, she started to jot down something about the  
water, and then noticed the two menacing pairs of eyes on her. "Oh...I  
didn't mean to disrupt you." She leaned over the water, catching  
sight of an old denim jacket that abated against the ever-growing trash heaps.  
"The Captain did what I asked," she observed gratefully. Returning  
to her pencil and paper, she finished writing, and frowned. Drawing a   
muddy test tube stopped with a cork out of her shirt pocket, she stared at it   
intently, and shook her head. She replaced the tube in her shirt, and craned her neck  
to find someone amongst the scattered throng of inhabitants. Taking  
a step to the side, she managed to spot her. The young woman with the dark brown hair.  
The rest of the males' conversation fell to their ears alone: she left the resevoir  
and walked towards Tifa, who was also staring at something while   
Yuffie was poking her shoulder. There was dark worry planted on her   
features. Something was wrong. "Ms. Lockheart?" Shera greeted,  
tranquil as usual.   
  
"What's he trying to---?" she asked herself, when she heard  
the euphonic voice of Shera.  
  
"Ms. Lockheart?"  
  
Tifa snapped out of her oblivious state. Cid was gone from view,  
and that tempted her to chase after him, but the scientist's concern  
couldn't be ignored. She turned towards her, her free-falling  
brown strands resting on her bare shoulder.  
  
"What?"  
  
"Hey, Tifa!! Talk to me!!!" blurted a red-faced Yuffie. Tifa   
pacified her with an acknowledgement, with the tenor of  
a mother talking to her child, and quickly turned again to   
the labcoated woman. After a while, Yuffie gave up and snuck  
away to dig for Materia, leaving the two of them there amongst  
the moving current of bodies.  
  
"There something wrong, Shera?"  
  
"Yes..with the recent influx of people from elsewhere into   
Sector 1, the water supply is growing polluted and lessening."  
  
"Water we can take care of. That's the problem?"  
  
"The water isn't," she started, running her finger down the pages of her  
notepad. "But overpopulation is. Since we have no way of purifying the water, eventually  
all of it will be inconsumable." Her expression was flat as Tifa's face darkened. "We need to limit  
the migrations into Sector 1."  
  
What do I do? I've got to tell Cid who we're dealing with, but we've had this problem  
for years..Not to mention we've armed most of them. Will they listen to us if we tell them  
they've got to move?  
  
The answer was clear when she saw a family from Sector 4 settle behind a   
mountain of garbage. The three-hundredth "foreigner" in two years. No...They don't have anywhere else to go. But if Shera's right..  
  
Tifa looked into the older woman's contemplative face and replied,  
  
"We'll figure out a way." She glanced with uneasiness at the spot on the ground   
where Cid had been. Hopefully he could keep the unwanted professor out of trouble  
until she could tell the pilot who it actually was...Before he had the chance to create another disaster.  
----------------------  
  
The Shin-Ra executives had seen the land, but what of the sea?  
  
Meteor had reshaped the land underneath the water. It had re-sculpted it, the eastern shelves severed from the mainland by Meteor's  
hellish columns of flames. The shelves tumbled into the opening seafloor, which engulfed the crumbling land in their  
molten inferno. Blood of swimmers, boatmen, and submariners were strewn through the   
trembling ocean, crushed to death under the falling shelves.   
  
A marine giant passed through the impenetrable gloom, groping its way through  
the underwater gorges that hadn't been obstructed by the wedges of land that had   
plunged to the bottom. Along with the helicopters, they had been dispatched to  
connect the thriving Junon with whatever human being that still may have been out there.  
  
The ping of the sonar punctuated the cramped air of the Shin-Ra submarine.  
The SOLDIERs who were manning it payed unwavering attention to their position.  
Once it had been possible to surface nearly anywhere. But now, they had to   
choose their route carefully. Away from the haven of Junon, they were at  
the mercy of the Planet.  
  
"Set course due east. Destination: Wutai."  
  
The old grey sub that Shin-Ra recaptured, rusted but still efficient, glided  
through the black depths of inner space, weaving its way under and over  
fallen stones, between the wrecks that had crumbled to the bottom, through  
the groaning chasms that snaked to one direction for leagues, only to   
terminate, and they would be forced to resurface to find an alternate route  
or torpedo the obstruction if it was small enough. Slowly, gradually, they  
edged their way to Wutai. The sub was well-stocked, with both ammunition and  
supplies. But..  
  
Several of the crew at the rear of the sub were thinking as they waited  
for the sub to reach the western town. Regardless if they were sober or not,  
if they were half-asleep on the floor or vomiting from seasickness, it was the same thought   
for all of them: What if Meteor got to Wutai?  
--------  
Quick, light clatter of one of the wild scorpion-like monster along a snapped pipe brought an immediate reaction from  
Barret. His Solid Bazooka made a heavy dent against the shabby wall to cease its travel, and  
all became quiet. That was enough to  
get Yuffie to stop chattering and brought the AVALANCHE meeting to order.  
  
"'Dose suckas 'gotta beat it o' somebody's 'gonna die!" the AVALANCHE leader  
resolved. Yuffie teasingly whomped Barret on the back of his head, at which  
he grew red-faced and incensed, but he knew how young girls were. After all,   
he had a young girl of his own. Before Meteor fell. He had been inconsolable for  
a long time, and anyone who mentioned his daughter's name in a bad light  
didn't live to laugh about it. Tifa and Cloud were present when this happened,  
when he saw Elmyra's house shatter under the pillars of judgement..hell's judgement  
against the innocent. If it wasn't for Sephiroth...  
  
"Come on, lighten up some! What's the big deal anyhow?" she asked, a bright grin   
plastered on her vibrant face. Tifa was in the corner, listening to the persistent  
scurrying of Midgar's wild beasts, the other crisis biting at her mind, trying to   
get her to leave the meeting and eliminate Hojo's potential threat. She unfolded her arms and gestured to the younger  
woman,  
  
"The problem, Yufife, is that Sector 1 is too crowded. We can't send   
them away," she pointed outside to the now-armed Sector 2, 3, and 4 inhabitants  
walking through the monster-infested area without dread. "They have weapons  
and we don't want to get kicked out ourselves."  
  
"So, what're we 'gonna---?" Yuffie started to ask, but cut off as Tifa's  
face was suddenly streaked with an uncharacteristic panic. Unable to take it anymore, she bolted for the exit, ramming through  
the light door out into the trash-paved street. Disoriented from being inside,  
she ran one way and then the other, realizing that that had been the wrong   
way, finally breaking off after Cid. She knew that he was dangerous.   
Cid could fend for himself, but against a monster as powerful as that? She  
slowed down. Maybe the pilot brought Hojo back to his cage? She jogged to the  
end of town, past the rundown shacks that housed Midgar denizens, often from  
several different families, crushing  
old newspapers and styrofoam cups beneath her. She reached the ratty door, only to   
find it was bolted.  
  
Must be out doing work, Tifa decided. Her anxiety rising, she dashed   
up the street, following the trail of cigarettes.   
---------  
The western-most shoreline had seen much. Its adolescence was the time that the first   
Wutaians set foot on it, at that time, lost wanderers who gave praise to their supreme  
deity Da-Chao for the shore that welcomed them there with young, strong arms. Many say that the old have lived out their lives, have  
had their golden moment in life, and are useless from there on, serving the  
aggravating purpose of relying on the young which they berate. But the Wutaian  
shore had its purpose, yet. Its arms were old and infirm, but recieved the  
lost youth in the present as it did in the past.  
  
As they did this day and every day before, a flock of bold Thunderbirds   
skimmed the ocean, riding the currents of the wind. Their feathers,  
crackling with light lightning, flapped to intercept the rare gust,  
which carried them to a higher vantage point. The small animals   
were on shore once again. And once again, they dove too close to the  
shore. Only this time, Vincent didn't shoot. He was perplexed with  
the flash of crimson, floating towards the shore. Before he touched it,  
he smelled the air around it. Wet fur. An animal. The red-eyed man  
took a step foward, bringing his other foot with it and closed his  
stance, giving him a stolid, strong, and yet, effeminate appearance.  
  
Vincent said nothing as he reached a pale hand, that was partially hidden   
by a black fingerless glove, into the water, grasped a tuft of red fur, and pulled the   
creature towards the dry, rocky land. Emotionlessly, completely dispassionate,  
he identified the animal.  
  
"Red XIII."  
  
He brought him free of the water, but noticed some..thing latched onto the end of  
his crimson tail.   
  
The man froze.  
  
It was the SOLDIER he had tried to save more than thirty years ago.   
A lifetime. It was horribly deformed, with every mark of a beast   
about it, its face, body, everything twisted into what Hojo   
called scientific progress. All falsehoods. Who knows, maybe the Mako Monster had everything going for it  
when it was a human. But it was destroyed...by him.   
  
The ex-Turk hadn't felt any emotion in a long time. But at that moment, he felt  
the passionate anger rise in him again, as a rekindled spark.   
  
I forgave him.....for this?  
  
A scowl formed on his nearly-white lips. Cloud's faint groan of hunger  
fell deaf on his closed ears. Taking the soggy Nanaki and the Mako Monster and pulling them to  
his chest, he headed for the distant fire belching a stream of smoke with his thoughts  
turning a different, vengeful direction, the phrases of hate finally spurting into a hot-blooded  
verbal condemnation.  
  
"I waive the sins from myself that are yours. May you bear the shame of your crimes and never rest in peace."  
------------  
If only his enemy could have heard that. But as it was, the former scientist was   
preoccupied.  
  
Cid had come to the road to the Plate, composed of endless stacks of   
fallen debris that had formed a gentle incline until it hit halfway,   
whereupon it became a cliff face and forked into other, firmer "roads".   
The quickest way was to head straight up,  
but those who tried met a gruesome death, as the slums wouldn't let them  
go, and it took them back greedily, feasting on their blood and mocking their  
worthless attempts by strewning their corpes at the base, serving as a grim  
headstone to taunt all who dared attempt to escape Midgar.  
  
Though he had come from the very bowels of the unstable  
below-Plate of the metropolis, it was ingrained in him to fly.  
Tiny Bronco, Highwind, and the countless test flights he had run  
with other Shin-Ra aircraft..it all returned to him and struck  
his tar-worn face with livid desire to find his long-lost airship. He stopped at the   
base of the gradual incline, debating with himself whether to turn back or keep   
going, and face the fact that it might be buried by the tons of metal that topped  
the Plate. Lighting a new cigarette, tossing the old one behind the creature,  
its reaction startling the pilot, for it expelled a throaty cough.  
  
"Shit, I goddamn heard that before--" He drew the current cigarette out of his  
deteriorating mouth, holding the carcinogen between thumb and the rest of his  
gloved fingers, blowing out the heavy vapors that formed a wispy streams in the air,  
and stared down the length of the chain until his eyes met the beast's. "Holy  
fuckin' Titan!!" His own eyes broadened as he saw some semblance of pupils  
dilate in the monster's luminescent eyes, the pupils taking on that cold  
glow that he constantly saw in Cloud's eyes....what was that stuff again? Mako?  
"Do that shit again!" yelled Cid, exhaling more smoke wisps that grew into clouds,  
so thick and massive for their source. It was oblivious: the lifeform stared skyward with those Mako-green pupils.   
The pilot glared down at him incredulously. "What the fuck're ya starin' at, freak?!"   
It stared up at him. The cold Mako glow was gone, and again was replaced with the  
burning violet. It was fixated on a light in the distance, which was a dagger's  
blade through the perpetual haze of the darkness. The hard whir of spinning rotor  
blades touched faintly on Cid's ear. People. A sliver of hope cut through his  
tired eyes. His grip closing on the chain, he jerked it, bringing the creature   
foward. With a coarse laugh, he shouted to the monster, "C'mon, ya slimy fuck!!"  
And he dragged it up the garbage mountain.  
----------  
"Just like old times."  
  
Reno held his weapon over his shoulder: an electrically charged baton. It was rusted,  
bent out of shape from the countless times he used it, and worn. One of the   
slum monsters skittered across the steel swamp. Reno slid the rod off of his   
shoulder and shoved it downward onto the animal's exoskeleton. The electricity that shot   
down the length of the rod stopped its heart instantly. He turned to Rude. "So old pal...  
wanna hit the usual joints?"  
  
The other led the two Turks across the sea of ruin. A survey of the area  
indicated that they had wasted their time coming here. He turned to Reno,  
staring at him through his shades, and answered,  
  
"I doubt there's any left."  
  
The Turks behind him were silent, their weapons in hand. "Do you hear that, Reno?"  
  
The other nodded his head, and the Shin-Ra party advanced towards the source of  
the noise, a noisy clatter of a chain and the clomp of boots on assorted garbage,   
muffled shouting and a high-pitched wail. Gradually both became coherent, and was  
entirely comprehensible when the smoking pilot stomped up onto the Plate.  
  
"Damn, that was some hard shit!!" he shouted between choked gasps for air. He   
pulled Hojo along, slapping one gloved hand to his chest, the tar and smoke-encrusted  
lungs inside it on the verge of collapsing. His tentative words gave way to a hacking cough, racked  
with the smoke that he had been ingesting for a good ten yars now, maybe more.   
The moment that it was over, the monster started to wail again. "What the hell're ya yappin'   
for?!" The answer came when he switched his glance from the ground to straight ahead,   
seeing two navy suits, a plaid suit, and a pinstriped one. It looked like the Turks  
had moved up. "Shit...  
didn't we kick your lousy Turk asses already?! Ya back for more?!"  
  
The executives were about to answer, but the Turks took a stride foward,   
their weapons at the ready. They may have been silent alone with their superiors,  
but among enemies their belligerence was apparent.  
  
"Crap talk comin' from an ass that can't dice a monster." The older man fumed,   
and he whipped out his Partisan. Spears..viewed as just, righteous weapons.  
But who said Cid was righteous? He enjoyed a good brawl as much as the next  
man.  
  
"Ya want crap? I'll shove this goddamn spear so goddamn far up your   
fuckin' ass that ya won't shit for a month!"  
  
It looked like the tension would give way to blows, but Rude stepped in before there could  
be any bloodshed, acting as, though improbable as it sounded, a mediator.   
  
"People, people, don't forget why we're here." The quiet, hairless man walked towards   
Cid, looking at him sunglasses-to-eye. "We're here to build and   
exterminate--" Cid shot him a raging glare. "---monsters."  
  
"Ain't trustin' ya," answered Cid. Rude returned him a look that said "what's not to trust?", and signalled to Reno.  
The former Turks approached the chained creature, which looked...expectant and anxious. The younger held his electric rod, and the elder had his  
fists balled up. Though they had become executives, they certainly hadn't gotten soft.  
  
Shera...Shera'll KILL me if anythin' happens to that damn freak!  
"What're ya shits 'gonna do to it?!" he exploded, bending his knees and taking a short hop that landed him in front of it,   
holding the chain behind his back. The executives stopped in front of him, not relinquishing  
their hold on their weapons. The old Turk fire seemed to have gripped them both, and  
there was no way they'd back down.  
  
"Don't interfere with this," warned Rude sternly. "We're doing this for your benefit."   
He motioned for the two Turks to hold Cid back in case he had a mind to impale them  
on the end of his spear, and they grabbed him by the  
arms and held him tightly, though the other struggled wildly, spouting out an ocean  
of cusses, while the former Turks lashed out, beating---or trying to kill the monster,   
both of their weapons having no effect. And all the while, Hojo stared  
up at them, his eyes narrowing in impatience.  
  
Confirm this scientific truth, Turks.   
  
As the futile beating wore on, this impatience turned to imploring.   
There is no such thing as paranormal. It has been refuted by all scientific  
research. There is no experiment that supports corporeal existence   
after a mortal blow..!  
  
Jenova.  
  
In the bleak sky he saw her grinning. Was this his punishment? Did he deserve  
punishment? Were these crimes his alone? The Mako-tainted clouds formed her  
malicious smile.   
  
Jenova...  
He raised his slimy body erect, using his tentacle-covered tail for balance as he questioned  
the alien puppeteer, his master who he refused to accept as such.  
  
What use am I to you? I've served my time as your drudge, both ends of  
the bargain are fufilled---WERE fufilled---many years ago. Why do you  
persist?   
  
Reno and Rude tired without having cut the monster. After a brief exchange   
or words, the former restrained Cid and the two Turks rushed in to attack   
the monster, their slightly more advanced, and unconventional, weapons in hand. The first Turk activated a drill, emitting a screeching whir, and the other   
brandished a spiked club with great zeal, raising it over his head.   
They had their turn at the monster, striking without mercy, having no pity whatsoever  
for the beast they were trying to slaughter.  
  
But..it was mercy for the monster. At last, Hojo felt the searing   
pain of the drill's sharp point cutting through his mucus-layered flesh, ripping through   
muscle and tissue, coupled with the spikes on the club that drew eddies of blood  
from his head. His head.....she was there. She had come. And she answered.  
  
The trade was fufilled, puppet.   
Don't you see? I am extending the agreement.   
  
You're keeping me alive...as punishment, am I   
correct? What atrocity did I commit to deserve a punishment?  
  
He could see her thin lips moving in his turbulent brain, the welcome  
pain of the Turks' weapons fading as she spouted condemnation as her   
truthful reply.  
  
Vincent Valentine, Cloud Strife, Red XIII---  
  
Her incriminating list continued, taking sadistic pleasure in watching  
him deny it and blame it on her, and she simply spoke faster to refute it,  
fueling guilt, fear, self-hatred..and pain. The kind of emotions she  
delighted in, she relished, especially when felt by her minions. She continued to list evey single one of his specimens,   
simply smiling self-righteously when he accused her of forcing him and replying  
with agonizing tranquility,  
  
I am an illusion. It was by your mind and your hand.  
  
No..you were directing me...I made the error of listening, but you  
instigated it.  
  
Blame the Planet if you like. It is you who must be punished.  
  
My only crime is that I served YOU and SCIENCE for my   
entire life, Jenova.   
  
Her demonic voice began to fade away, dissipating into the vast reaches of nothingness.   
But still, an echo, that hissed in his vexed, the forked tongue of a   
merciless viper handing down an imperious order of the gods.  
  
Repent...  
  
Impossible. It's absurd to atone for other's transgressions!  
  
Repent...or live.  
  
You just admitted to being an illusion, which if true,  
you would be a figment of my imagination and would be  
unable to enforce that ridiculous insult to reason.   
That Turk will puncture my superior vena cava in  
three and a millionth of a second.  
  
3  
  
2  
  
1...  
  
The Turk was baffled. His drill was in halfway. He should have hit SOME vital  
organ that would have kiled it, but..no. Its eyes were open, mocking his failure.  
At least, that's how he percieved it. He ripped the drill from the monster's back with a  
frustrated curse, succeeding in drawing a few more drops of blood from the thing. His  
partner had quit earlier, the futility dawning on him at the six or seventh strike.  
  
Hojo couldn't believe it. He refused to believe it. His heart completely  
pierced through, and he was still conscious, breathing, living.   
  
Living.   
  
It was the truth.  
  
She had kept her word.   
  
And now he was sentenced to life.  
  
Something in his scientific mind snapped. It wasn't a momentary deviation   
from the ragged shred of sanity that hadn't departed with Jenova's arrival,  
It was a change that would grip him until---death? Not possible any longer.   
Because of Jenova.  
  
Blood dripped out of Cid's ear as the monster shrieked. It was the plea  
of a thousand tortured demons languishing in the torment of the eternal flames,  
while the mightier devils taunted them from their throne of skeletons,  
laughing at the condemned.   
  
It was an outcry he'd never heard before and hoped to never hear again, and clapped his hands on his ears to muffle the sound, shouting obscenities  
at both it and Shera. Reno and the two Turks broke off in pursuit of the monster, that was tracing wild, haphazard circles through the concrete bed. There was no  
reason for its uncalculated movements. It was driven. Driven off the edge.  
With another blood-curdling cry, he broke the shackle that weighed him down, and fled. It was safe to say that  
Professor Hojo had entered the realm of insanity from which there was no return.   
  
Cid wheezed and hacked, the soles of his worn-out combat boots hitting the uneven   
surface heavily. It annoyed him that Reno was farther ahead, considering his drinking  
habits, but it looked like this was one of the few times he was sober. He, like most,  
were different when sober. He was alert, focused.  
  
"Thought ya didn't wanna cooperate, Highwind."  
He ran harder, but still was losing sight of the monster, and was tiring as well.  
The second wind seemed to be late in coming.  
"Damn, it gets around---"  
  
"I ain't doin' shit for ya!" Cid coughed with ire flashing in his narrowed  
eyes. Reno smirked as he and his Turks continued the chase, leaving a wiped-out  
Cid with his hands on his knees, panting heavily. He mastered the sky, but  
on land he was dead last. As if his habit couldn't get any worse, he   
reached for one of his seemingly infinite supply. Snatching up the lighter  
with his other hand, he grumbled with a growl in his   
unrefined voice,  
  
"If that fuck gets loose, Shera'll boil my ass alive!!!"  
  
He was just about to flick on the lighter when a female  
voice reached his ears, and he met her halfway. She  
greeted him with a question, the urgency of it evident  
in her fearful eyes.  
  
"Cid! Where did it go?!"  
  
The blonde man darkened several shades of purple, and   
started yelling something or other at the woman, who   
was making calmer gestures, trying to pacify the enraged pilot. Their conversation   
wasn't lost to the only two listening. They heard their every word,   
a heated exchange where it seemed they had some trouble communicating,  
and when the message was finally forced out, Cid promptly spat his cigarette  
a good yard. Rude appeared impassive, waiting out the conversation without  
letting on he was listening, and the other, too shocked to breathe. At the   
end of the conversation, Tifa made one thing clear.  
"We need to find him before he finishes what he started."  
  
Not bothering to replace the cigarette, Cid gave a gruff acknowledgement and followed the   
fighter towards Midgar's border. As his curse streams abated into indistinct  
yelling, and as the Plate was overtaken by the deadness of  
a crypt, Rude headed towards the helicopter with intentions of   
contacting and informing Elena, and the scientist, still clutching her data tables  
and observations, stood transfixed, a zombie staring into   
the drifting haze, stripped of every conscious thought except for one.  
  
"He's..alive."  
  
She brought her right hand behind her labcoat into her shirt pocket,  
pulling a paper-thin red card out of it. Though the light filtered dim through  
the polluted sky, it caught the Shin-Ra logo, covered with a thick film of an unidentifiable crust  
from the under-Plate filth, but the red-and-gold hue still apparent. Remembering times long past,  
she squeezed the card in her hand, lowering her head as tears of mixed joy and  
sorrow rolled down the side of her head and struck the dead metal beneath her. "Hojo..."  
  
To be continued... 


	6. Biding Maelstrom

Legal Stuff: Hojo, Lucrecia, Rude, Barret, Custom Sweepers, Kalm Fangs, Hedgehog Pie, Cid, Tifa, Reno, Turks, Sephiroth, and all characters, objects, places,  
pertaining to Final Fantasy VII are copyright to Squaresoft.  
This is beginner and nonprofit. Any similarities in plot or  
dialogue or monologue to other fanworks are coincidental.  
Hiya! Welcome to the sixth chapter of my sucky sequel!^^  
Special thanks to Master Garo Shiriksuo, Erin, and  
Eponine 16732 for their support! Ages are from general consensus...  
OOC is unintentional! Note: I'm not bashing Cid. OO; Or else Erin  
would severely hurt me. ^^; Anyway, I'm portraying him how Shera  
might view him. Thank you.^^ Special thanks to Erin for inspiring me  
with a title!  
started: 9/7/02 finished: 9/14/02 modified: 10/7/02 re-modified: 10/8/02  
Rated: PG-13 for somewhat graphic violence and profanity.  
  
"He looked like any other specimen."  
  
Guilt in his robes of persistent prodding rose from the  
forgotten realm of wrongs buried deep within the conscience.  
"I locked him up..my own husband." Fear removed his robe and  
shrouded the woman with it, alleviating the nagging whispers  
and displacing it with a sable cloud of the latter. "They know..  
why do they want to capture him? What wrong did he do apart from..."  
Fear vanished with the untimely arrival of doubt, which rode into  
the fray of her mind.  
"...Mako Reactors?"  
  
First Vincent, now Hojo. But the former had gone and the latter had returned. One huge revolving door between life  
and death, sending those she thought dead into life, and those  
she thought alive into death. And now he was alive...  
mutated enough to make her believe that he was a slum animal, a perfect  
subject to study in her cramped lab, in a cage, no less. But that didn't change him..  
He was still the same man she had met over thirty years ago....right?  
  
Memories, whirling and fleeting. They shot rapid-fire, crushing waves tumbling over  
a troubled ocean, begging ever louder for her to stop hiding from the demon that was  
her past.  
  
I will dedicate my life to science.   
  
He's a dangerous man.  
  
You were right, Vincent...  
  
There's a treasure of knowledge to be amassed in this field.  
  
He mentioned offhand to me that he wanted to experiment on humans.  
  
Yes, he did...  
  
This wealth is superior to its material equivalent.  
  
Stay away from him.  
  
I'm sorry that I didn't..  
  
It requires the power of intellect and logical reasoning  
  
I'm warning you.  
  
He destroyed my life..  
  
Which all humans have been gifted with but few decide to   
maximize its potential.  
  
You'll kill us all.  
  
Yours,  
  
Used correctly  
  
Lucrecia  
  
And his.  
  
There are only possibilties---  
  
"'Which normally outweigh the risks and consequences  
that will invariably be a factor in the introduction of  
new technology,'" Shera quoted him remorsefully. She stared   
at the ruins of Midgar. Perhaps it was better if it was  
ruined, as it caused much suffering when it stood. But...  
people were starving either way. With a wistful sigh she  
placed the Shin-Ra card in her pocket, and bowed her  
head. "You didn't have Midgar in mind when you said that..."  
she said numbly. Squeezing her eyes shut, she slowly   
looked skyward. Despite his past crime, despite that everyone  
else wanted him killed or locked up, he was her husband.  
She had lost him once to Jenova. Her chance to recover him  
once and for all was now. Walking briskly by Rude, she   
cautiously made her way under the Plate, with a firm resolve  
ringing with clarity in her turbulent mind.  
  
"I have to help him."  
  
Repent Or Live  
  
by Blue9Tiger  
  
VI: Biding Maelstrom  
  
Shera exchanged a few gil pieces with the AVALANCHE leader for  
a weapon. It was a fourth-hand Winchester, and she purchased  
it for barely anything. She felt strange holding it...its  
texture, length, and design reminded her of the Death Penalty  
she had given to the soulless, almost undead Vincent before the apocalypse. Some good that  
did. Meteor still fell, and now her son was dead...again.   
When he told her beyond the waterfall, she shut off the old projector from a room Cid never went into,  
and they hadn't spoken since. As a scientist, she should've  
been able to weather it: she had weathered her own 'death' and  
gotten over it. Why did Vincent have to return, as a dispassionate  
monster because of Jenova infusions, no less? He reminded her of her past she had forgotten and buried  
into the recesses of her mind. She hadn't been---enjoying   
this second life, acting as a mechanic, maid, and sounding board  
for Cid, but it made her existence bearable, bearable enough so that  
she could resist impaling herself on the blades at the Rocket Town  
weapon shop.   
  
What good would that do? She was immortal. Others may have   
found it a blessing, but for her, Vincent, and Hojo, it was a curse.  
She would grow to be frail, her sharp mind would deteriorate, and   
be unaware of it, hidden by the deception of apparent youth. She was  
surprised Cid didn't catch onto her agelessness.  
Then again, he had his own problems. Cid was usually busy with AVALANCHE affairs:  
why would he care if Shera didn't gain a single wrinkle or shrink a few inches?  
If he did care, he sure didn't let on that he did. If he wasn't at an AVALANCHE meeting  
he was yelling at her to scrounge for a minty herbal in the garbage or yelling at her because she  
added one more complication to his life by asking him favors every now  
and then. But he completed the task, complaints or not.   
  
Not that she minded his crankiness anymore. She understood  
the reasons for it. Aside from the initial launch, her need for  
privacy, which amounted to having the whole house to herself at   
the start of each month, grated on his nerves. Then he'd have to sleep outside   
on the porch and get badgered for making a ruckus. But that was a   
lesser reason. Anyone who had grown up in Midgar's slums had the right to be  
irritable. She acknowledged that with her patience,   
  
She tied her hair with a turquoise Ribbon as she hurried away  
from Barret's armory, and slipped on a rusted Iron Bangle that   
someone either dropped or was desperate enough to kill for,  
and was killed in turn by someone else who vied for it, ultimately  
resulting in a never-ending wheel of blood. What for? It  
was cheap and broke easily, but any piece of armor they could  
get down there was better than its worth.   
  
Heading towards the mountain of rubble that served as a stairway  
to the Plate, she passed by the resevoir. It had already gotten  
dirtier, from what she could deduce by looking at it. Barret and  
Yuffie were probably too busy with weapons distributing and selling  
that the overcrowding problem would only get worse. But..if  
she stayed there, her husband would be slaughtered like a   
Nibel Wolf at a butcher's shop, especially  
now that that Shin-Ra and AVALANCHE knew. Raising her brown eyes to the  
looming mountain, she knew in both her mind and, so often   
neglected by Shin-Ra scientists, her soul, Lucrecia holstered  
the Winchester and set off, ignoring the insistent voice   
warning her that this excursion was one she might not return from.  
-------  
Eat to live, kill to eat. The chain linked predator and prey  
and forced dependence on the other, as this was how the delicate  
food web functioned.  
  
Midgar's surrounding territory was devoid of life, but not  
of existence. One breed alone withstood the destruction at that  
close of a proximity to the metropolis. They roved over the  
exposed earth, their mass-produced skeletons slowly collecting  
wear and decay from the oxygen in the chemical-rent atmosphere.  
  
They were the Custom Sweepers.  
  
The rest had filtered out after the others of their kind  
after the Mako Reactors were destroyed. Outside they roamed,  
apart from the city, blocking the weak that would dare  
fight through their territory. The entire Midgar area,  
that was their land, now. Their counterparts' faulty  
design had strewn nuts, bolts, gears, cogs, chains, wiring,   
plating, screws, washers, wheels, axles, batteries, and   
weaponry in a bleak belt across the northern tip of the  
eastern continent. The Custom Sweepers survived, and alone   
they roamed the dead ground.  
  
Piercing eyes, made hostile by hunger, fixated on the   
Custom Sweepers with deadly intent. Desperate, but deadly.  
Their alpha, a virtual pile of bones, whose ribcage was  
covered thinly by a thin sheet of flesh and fur, led the  
pack behind a projection of land. Its weak growl was the  
signal. If the others were confused, they didn't bother  
to show it as they charged towards the machines they had  
been reduced to feeding upon. If the dead spark of hope  
somehow had weathered the catastrophe, it would make them  
believe that there was some digestable mineral in  
that insufferable crap. But it was that or die.  
  
The starving Kalm Fangs launched themselves over the  
ground. They were an extension of the death in   
the ground, and became its vengeance. Ravenous snarls  
transformed the lifeless atmosphere into impending  
chaos. Their prey was quick, but Custom Sweepers were limited by programming.  
Kalm Fangs, had no limits of the will.  
  
The Custom Sweepers' machine guns hurled rapid shells at  
their flesh, colliding with the brittle bone inside and   
bursting through the flesh wall, sprawling them   
dead only long enough to grasp the wretched waste in  
their eyes before they dissolved into the Lifestream.   
The others that remained lunged at the Custom Sweepers  
and sank their teeth into the alloy, hanging from the  
machine by their incisors that hadn't been used for   
days. The metal ground between the sharp points  
of their fangs, and they ate it with no relish,  
but for the sole purpose of getting something...ANYTHING  
into their stomach, to satisfy the roaring hunger pangs  
that numbed them to the fact if something was indigestible.  
To hell with it. It was food.  
----------  
One stout ball of magenta traversed the ground with short  
bounces that alerted others to its presence...that used to, anyway. Its race  
had already been receding when Sector 5 caved in, demolishing the church with it.  
It blinked its beady eyes, that were but twin cracks in its padded face.   
Years spent in the rafters where the excess barrels of liquor were thrown after  
they were emptied, their view was limited. But their hearing was acute. If  
there was anyone up there they'd know it. The survivor was no exception.   
  
The three years it had been living in the cold valley it hadn't heard   
human voices. Hedgehog Pie drew back, hearing not one, nor two, but a score of   
humans. One of the voices became distinct very quickly, in the form of  
strange words that it had heard many times before from the people that  
came to the rafters, but never understood. All it knew that after the  
words were spoken, one of its brethen would scream, bleed until it died,  
and would vanish. This curse the Hedgehog Pie couldn't explain, and   
stayed far away from humans from then on. These approaching   
ones it was wary of as well. They were headed straight into  
its territory, which Hedgehog Pies marked very clearly. With a growl it  
jumped in front of its boundary. By now the words could now be made  
out. A loud clatter preceded each one of the mysterious words: they  
were approaching. It jumped in the shape of a square, growing  
more anxious as the din grew more distinct. What appeared as  
vague blobs gradually came into focus. They were running.  
Five of them. The Hedgehog Pie panicked, and made the first  
advance, leaping towards the running humans.   
  
"Fuckin' shit's that?!" Cid barked, thrown into a coughing fit  
from the exhausting trip. The monster, though small, was alarming,  
perpetual maliciousness ingrained on its pudgy face. He  
tossed his Partisan up and caught it again, gripping the weapon  
with heightened readiness. Tifa closed her fists and leaned into a fighter's  
stance, focusing on the threatening-looking animal in front of them. Nothing  
compared to what they saw in the Northern Crater in terms of size, but  
any monster could be dangerous. They hesitated in attacking, eliciting  
a snide comment from the promoted Turk behind them. Promoted, maybe,  
but in their eyes, as big a jerk as before.  
  
"Never could kill just like--" Reno snapped his fingers."-that, huh?"  
He took a casual stride towards the spiny chunk of flesh. Boredom etched  
on his face, he ground the Hedgehog Pie into the slabs of crushed pavement  
as the Turks looked on in menacing approval.   
  
"To think you're the badasses that bombed Sector 1," Reno snickered,  
prodding the electric rod against the stiff hide of the corpse.  
He didn't need to wait long for a retaliation. Before long, the  
smoking pilot was in his face, holding his Partisan in a  
maneuverable position that would spear his breast in a heartbeat.   
  
"Ya'd better fuckin' shut your cakehole or I'll stuff this shit  
through your rank ass!"  
  
Reno was glad for a brawl. He couldn't restrain himself any longer.  
Who could at home, or at least where they were most comfortable? He  
drew his rod and managed to smash it over Cid's head, sending a  
debilitating current through his smoke-worn bones that caused  
him to stagger back and fall onto the battered asphalt with a   
crash. He laid on his back for a few moments, blinking up   
at the aggressor. Aqua fire lit his dry eyeballs, and he   
stood, swaying a bit from the aftershock. He straightened his  
Partisan, rage creasing his tar-aged features. "I GODDAMN WARNED YA,  
FUCKCRAP!!"  
  
The pilot lunged, tripping over Tifa's workboot. He hit the  
decrepit road again, slamming his lower jaw on the asphalt.  
He teetered trying to plant his soles firmly on the unbalanced  
ground, and glared Mythril arrowheads at the former bartender,   
rough voice edged with distrust.  
  
"Ya 'gonna take this shit from Shin-Ra?!"  
  
Tifa clenched her fists and lowered her head, her shock of brown  
hair framing her normally optimistic face. She looked straight into  
Cid's marble eyes.  
  
"You think I trust them? After what they did to the Planet? To my FATHER?"  
Cid's reply was cut off by a firm, "No." She motioned to Reno and the  
Turks. Compared to the threat out there, these people, hated by  
AVALANCHE as they were, were small fries. Though she didn't like it,   
there would have to be a degree of trust between the two organizations, even if it was only faint.  
"We both have the same goal.." she declared, her dark eyes narrowing  
into livid slits. A tense silence stretched itself longer than  
it actually was, both parties watching each other with distrustful  
glares, anticipating their next move as a fatal one, Cid   
especially watchful of the enemy, rubbing his sore jaw with  
a grimace. Like it or not, he had to give the wench credit  
for trying to smooth things over. But a truce?   
  
Swimming through syrup, Tifa picked up her gloved hand as if it  
was gauntleted with whole block of concrete, and grabbed Reno's  
that was equally slow to move. But they clasped, and firmly shook,  
sealing the covenant.  
----------  
The madness had ended.  
  
Hojo was as he always had been. Garbed in his old labcoat,  
his black tie hanging limp like a dead snake coiled slovenly   
about his neck, around which the shirt collar was still upturned.   
Grumbling at these "unnecessary inconveniences", he wiped the   
subject's blood from the lenses on a cloth. Pilate alleviating himself  
of the blame...for a lurid execution.   
  
The aged scientist lifted his glasses by the frame and respositioned  
them firmly on his face, and then disposed the cloth. One of his assistants  
let his eye wander towards the stained fabric, but the forced silence  
from him told Hojo that he wouldn't have to answer any inessential questions...not today,  
anyway. There was always the unqualified idiot that President Shin-Ra had managed  
to pick up from the street, rush him through a mere four years of schooling, and  
dump him in the Science department. Hojo twitched with annoyance as he regarded  
the assistant contaminating the batch of chemicals because he had poured too much.  
  
Ah...it's no surprise at all. No, not at all.....the cretin with the least credentials  
stumbles his way into my lab.  
  
The twitch in his clasped hands travelled up his stringy arms, into the marrow,  
and spread through his hunched shoulderblades, eliciting a queer stare from one  
of the other assistants that stopped what he was doing to admonish his peer.   
Hojo ignored this proceeding, and instead began to walk away from the laboratory,  
lost in his own entangled thoughts.   
  
A light engulfed the corridor. It refused to dissipate for the longest time,  
latching to the atmosphere with a taunting glare from its core. Hojo percieved  
SOMETHING from its brightness, but he couldn't quantify it. Impossible..  
everything was quantifiable. Everything could be reduced to numbers.   
Including him. Ah, but there was the beauty of numbers. Though his subjects  
would often complain and lament, he knew that numbers only simplified. A number  
instead of a name. Simple language, but to outsiders, strangely sophisticated  
and transcending the "norm" of intellect.   
  
Blood. No, that wasn't blood. The tattoo. His own number. The number of one of his specimens.  
That couldn't be right...He was the scientist; it was the specimen. But in the interest of science,  
there was nothing degrading about being the researched subject. Then why did he...feel  
degraded? This was one of the rare times that he didn't have an inkling as to   
how to answer that. He continued to shuffle towards the center of the light, pondering  
his inquiry.   
  
Perhaps it's improbable to expect to be both specimen and scientist...but there  
is no approved theory which supports its separation. I am, therefore, still a   
scientist. still human. Why, doubting it is preposterous! Humanity's definition is rationality  
as opposed to instinct.   
  
It was sheer impulse that brought him to the center of the light.   
  
Who did he see there but.....him.  
  
In his splendor and glory...of the ninth circle's variety. Surrounding the  
one-winged terror were geysers of unbridled inferno. They vomited flaming  
comets that seared falling Xs in the escalating flame as they crossed the other's  
blazing path. Hojo looked up at the dormant god. If he felt overwhelmed by his presence,  
it didn't appear on his face. But of course. What daunted him but the failure of reason?  
  
Sephiroth.   
  
He frowned.   
  
Perhaps I've made an error in  
calculation...zero percent of your body mass can be detected, which could only be true if...  
  
He stared up at Sephiroth with a glare of disappointment.   
  
..the Jenova Project has failed.  
But...how? It was planned to to the finest detail, the entire  
procedure guaranteed point one percent of error.  
  
He grated his teeth.  
  
You were designed to be invulnerable, indestructable. I spent   
twenty-seven years of my life nurturing you, the most practical  
scientific advancement ever to be pursued. How do you repay  
me? You let yourself be taken to the Lifestream.  
  
The god awoke. His one wing unfurled, it shed the white  
feathers that exploded into flame from the heat. Hojo felt  
he was becoming sweaty, and stared behind him. The flames  
stretched to the ceiling, barring escape from the demonic  
angel. The ceiling.....what ceiling? The angular halls of  
Shin-Ra Headquarters had melted from view. There was only  
the fire and the deity, hellish heaven and the omnipotent god.  
  
In place of Mako green, his eyes burned white, the righteous cloak of purity  
and faultlessness. Laden with irony, for this was the very same who summoned  
Meteor with the Black Materia. Nevertheless, the strands of his silver hair floated   
gloriously behind him, he hovered amidst the flames without feeling  
the burn of its heat that was reserved for lesser mortals, and gazed down at the weak old man  
chastizing...HIM for being the failure. His lips curled into an expectant smile of unsupressed  
disgust, and with one sweep of his palm, cast the scientist into the  
tower of flame. And then, the condemning thunder rent his eardrums scorching in the heat.  
  
I am a failure?  
  
Hojo wriggled out of the fire's grasp, away from the searing tongues  
that licked at his labcoat. He hopped onto the platform, no...the...altar?  
Whatever it was, he smothered the fire, the smoke pouring off of him as   
Sephiroth drove the opalescent Masamune of his words borne out of hatred and contempt  
into who he'd often call in the most polite terms a nobody. "You have never transcended your position in  
life." The scientist shot him a disbelieving glare.  
  
I find that utterly---  
  
You never surpassed Professor Gast. You have descended from  
your point of intelligence.  
  
Ha...you were reared as a soldier, Sephiroth. What would you  
possibly know except for the basics of intellect?  
  
That assumption is unmeritorious. I know many things.  
Out of a glowing sheath he slid the just blade of the   
Masamune itself, this time not of words but this actual blade of justice, luminous in the wake of the climbing inferno.  
Hojo watched with building alarm as layers of his skin fell   
off as the flames burned through. As he watched himself burn,  
Sephiroth pointed the long blade towards his hateful fath-----no. To acknowledge him as that  
raised him many levels above what he was actually worth..to him, and to the Planet.   
  
You created a god. I acredit you for that much. He took the   
blade and ran the tip along his chest, not to gouge, but to slice.  
The white-hot end that was enhanced by the flames made him cry  
out, but he stifled it before Sephiroth could mistake it for   
a plea for mercy. "That god is a god of destruction, endowed with  
the power of judgement over the condemened." The other took the blade and traced a nearly  
indiscernible streak across his flesh, until he reached the  
chest, whereupon he thrust the blade upwards, piercing the left lung.  
Forcing the sword through his back, he glided nearer, ripping  
through the ribcage as he pressed the Masamune's hilt against  
the chest. Looking into his father's Jenova eyes,   
the thunder abated into a whisper that echoed through the   
crackling fire. You are the condemned.  
  
He moved the blade upward, snapping through bone, muscle,  
and brain as he split him in two from the chest upward. The two halves of the man  
dropped into the fire, and Sephiroth withdrew his bloody   
Masamune, smiling with godly triumph. The corpse smoldered in the hungry inferno.  
------------  
Hell had melted away to allow another to oust it. Underneath  
him was the dead vastness of Midgar's surrounding area. Nothing   
but bare, sterile earth. It was an illusion. Of course. He hadn't  
returned briefly to human form for Jenova's amusement, and Sephiroth  
was dead. He wasn't out to pass judgement on him. What RIGHT did  
he HAVE to do that, anyway? What was he guilty of?  
  
Ridiculous notion.  
  
He crawled along the lifeless ground, hit by a burning pain.  
There was something liquid under him. With a cry the jawless  
animal squirmed on his belly until he turned around completely.  
No. It couldn't be..his blood? It lay strewn on the low rock  
projections, bubbling with eerie vibrance. The substance   
was wearing Jenova's mocking face. Laughing...laughing at him,  
the professor.   
  
It satiates her..whim to bombard me with illusions and falsities. Ha...  
inflicting a superficial wound...she didn't actually believe that would fool me into thinking  
it was REAL, did she?  
  
Though he was laughing in his mind, he painfully pushed himself foward with his tentacles, leaving a blood  
trail along the ground, unaware of the snarling sack of brittle bones  
following the luminous substance. Dark green chunks of meat was wedged in its sunken  
jaw. It hunted, but the flesh hadn't rejuvenated the beast: the slow-moving prey had been  
an easy target, and it merely had to walk to tear off a slab of the meat.   
  
I see what the object is.   
Unfeasible illusion..a tweaked memory of the lab and a simulation of "hell" with Sephiroth  
acting as a judge? Is this your  
pathetic attempt to make me repent, Jenova?  
  
There were still some wild ones among them. They were weakened by hunger, but still possessed their abilities as wild animals, and were posessed by a desire to eat and live. With a ferocious snarl, several of the  
pack struck down the weaker Kalm Fang with a lightning-quick claw swipe and, violating  
their own law to preserve their own species, ravaged by near-starvation, feasted upon it.  
The tentative prey was drowned in the one-way conversation with an invisible entity.  
  
My brain is more potent than that, Jenova. Yes...you did rob me of my intellect for--Eighty point---or was it  
longer?  
  
Blank. Something buckled in his tireless cerebrum. It wasn't driven by  
Jenova's eerie voice. In that instant, the thought didn't materialize.  
He waved it aside.  
  
No, it doesn't matter. You won't steal it again. My  
capacity for reason outlasts yours.  
  
The Fangs devoured the bones. Their other prey sat, already bleeding   
from the bite of their pack member, and unwilling to flee. They needed to eat.  
  
Wait....Crouch....  
  
Have it your way, Jenova. I will...accept this "punishment".  
I can accept living, I'm certain I can handle this..torture you've  
prepared...though I hardly call these infantile tricks torture---  
  
Pounce.  
  
Unable to disembark from his own mental train, He found himself surrounded by a flurry of   
fur and claws with blazing inferno gripping their ravenous   
eyes, lengthening the hole in his chest and drawing new blood with  
a savage streak. The outcry was stifled, but it came nonetheless,  
clear in his bestial shriek.  
  
Rarely had been aware enough to actually feel physical punishment,  
drunk with Mako infusions, preoccupied with thoughts that brought on mental  
pain and, on the Sister Ray, numbed the wall of bullets in his chest into a faraway pain,  
the same way the drill wound had abated...but this one...it HURT.  
Why did it hurt? He had no answer to this simplistic question,  
for all his knowledge and intellect.   
  
It hurt so he fled from this that caused the hurt.  
  
The madness had already started: reality was more cruel than the dream.  
  
To be continued... 


	7. Mirage of Hope

Legal Stuff: All characters relating to Final Fantasy VII are copyright  
to Squaresoft. This is a beginner's work and nonprofit.   
Any similarity to other fanworks in plot, events, characterization,  
chronology--you get the picture.   
Hey, everyone! I'm working at it..eventually, I MIGHT write as well  
as you, Erin! -_^ And write as darkly as Master Garo! ^^ oO As if  
that'll ever happen. X X: Enjoy the fic. Or not. Whatever floats  
your boat. Note2: I have   
nothing against overweight people. It was for characterization  
purposes only. Thank you.  
started: 9/15/02 finished: 9/21/02 modified: 9/21/02 modified:9/2202  
re-modified: 10/8/02  
Rated: G to PG.  
  
It's quicker to destroy than to create, re-destroy and re-create.   
The time it takes to destroy a seventy year old man and a seven  
year old boy can be a length as agonizing as the tormentor wants  
it to be, or a single heartbeat. Bringing the same seventy year  
old man from the Lifestream, the paradoxical existence of life  
in death, and restoring him to his shape before decadence  
took longer than returning him to the Lifestream.   
  
Such was the logic of Jenova.  
  
If it was her fancy, she could summon those who'd been infused with her body cells.  
The ones who had large amounts of Jenova in them, but not enough  
to halt their mortality altogether, she could only toy with their mind.  
  
Those who hadn't been infused, she had no power over. Though she was   
blessed with the manipulative energy of her homeworld, her  
range of control was limited. For the dead. The living she could  
move mentally. The dead she could move bodily.  
  
But above all..she loved to play. It didn't matter if the  
toy was broken. She could always fix it.  
  
Repent or Live  
  
by Blue9Tiger  
  
VII: Mirage of Hope  
  
A Zuu flanked by the stagnant red wake of the Mako monsters   
surfed the coastline. With each despairing screech  
the other monsters gradually lost more of the falsity  
of hope. Red was no longer salvation, but the bleak destiny it  
came to be associated with, painted with its  
ruby horror.  
  
One "awwrrak". Two. Three. Four. On and on they   
struck a sour chord, relaying the distressing message  
through the melancholy, minor-keyed piece. But on  
the empty shoreline, where the repulsive things had been   
and gone, the odor of crimson was deaf to the warning song.  
Its broad shadow minimized as it lifted into the weary  
clouds. Corpses didn't comprehend what it needed to say.  
It rode the crests of the wind tides, waking the drowsy grazers  
and unrelenting predators alike, and in a strange tongue the  
last note reverberated in the stale air:  
  
The guardian's dead.  
----------  
That balmy, gentle breeze that once marked Costa del Sol  
as an ideal vacation area now brought deathly silence as its rider.   
Savage snarls were heard scattered through the lavish  
villa, made a grim cemetary by the misshapen creatures, where  
they haunted, but never dwelled. Yes, to humans and native   
monsters alike, these were unforgiving demons. But what rendered them thus?  
They were lost souls imprisoned in abominable shells, aching for the only justice they knew  
how to deliver. Vengeance..For their original  
bodies lost to the monstrous shape they were confined to, for  
their wives and children who never saw them again,  
for their promising lives that were taken by some twisted hand  
and squelched like they were nothing.   
  
They roamed the coast with no aim but vengeance,  
wild, white-hot justice flaring in their eyes, their  
malformed claws breaking the firm sand, carving a trail  
through the beach, now deserted of all humans. They didn't  
move in packs, but in masses, blindly, though their distinct  
eyes seethed in molten rage, wild and unbound. Beyond fear.  
Beyond uncertainty. They were wronged demons. The ones who  
went first had spent an eternity in those Mako pods. Wasting,  
rotting, dying. As the abnormal. The freak. But no longer.  
They were multiplied and ran rampant throughout the western  
continent. They were FREE..to wreak havoc on everything..and one day,  
find the maniac who'd done...THIS to them.   
  
And Hell would follow.  
-----------  
It was an avaricious behemoth in itself. It gorged on its  
victims and never released them, its breath of cyclonic sand  
barring them forever from hope of escape, the very heat of   
its respiration threatening to burn them in that desert inferno  
under the sun, and freeze them under the unclothed sky.   
If they weren't pulverized into submission by the burning fire  
above, they were killed by the cold.  
  
The worst decay is wrought by time.  
  
Early in the second year, Dio had panicked at the amount getting free: the ones down below suffered  
for his error in judgement. On a good day when the body count was low,  
Corel inmates were banned from the Chocobo races. In the past, their ticket to freedom.  
Their parole. But, with an announcement thorugh Mr. Coates, the policy ended:  
as the scourge of society, the scapegoat when Gold Saucer regulars  
needed a fast explanation for whatever blood had been shed,  
the way up was sealed.  
  
The prisoners weren't aware of their comparitively good fortune.   
The vast Corel Desert lay between them and a constantly awaiting   
death. They didn't realize this, but the people outside  
did. The humans didn't trust Nanaki any more than they trusted the Mako  
monsters. As far as they were concerned, he was one of them. It didn't  
matter if he sought to protect them. He was an animal.  
  
From North Corel, Gongaga, and Rocket,  
they flocked to the Gold Saucer, exchanging freedom and  
dignity for a safe zone. Dio was awestruck: one day a  
Gongaga lowlife would try and break the arcade games,  
and the next day a fairly upstanding Nibelheim citizen  
would steal from his OWN display room. A trinket compared to   
the gems he kept there, but that he'd even dare to attempt the  
theft was infuriating. But, that wasn't the worst. It started  
to cost him gil, when the regulars were assaulted and demanded  
recompense. Then there was that other guy that killed  
a Chocobo in a race that was fixed to begin with.  
He sent them all down the gullet of Corel.   
  
But it continued. The more desperate ones would  
try to hurl themselves down there, and consequently  
be expelled from the Gold Saucer and thus, the safe  
haven, where the creatures were. No where it was safe..but  
Corel Prison.  
  
The complex itself, surrounded by weak wire fences,  
soon proved too small for the amount of scum they were  
getting. Dio eventually cut off this flow and declared  
that the desert was off-limits. Other lawbreakers  
would simply be tossed outside. But, before he made  
this decision, one more nobody managed to get himself tossed into  
Gold Saucer's underbelly.  
  
Ironically..it wasn't on purpose.  
-----  
"You'd think this kind of fiasco happens to  
Midgarians."  
  
The man squinted through the haze of sand. Everywhere there  
was sand. Everytime the wind blew, sand would be everywhere.  
In his eyes, in his nose, his mouth, ears...this  
situation was unhealthful. "Not Mideels." He bit his   
lower lip, dry as the wall of sand. "In Mideel we get   
attacked by Weapons, flooded with rain, and acclaimed as  
a 'swell town'." An uneasy tread marked his venture further  
into the desert. Farther from the fences and dilapidated   
shacks that inmates killed for to flee the excruciating  
heat. "Good--climate," he rasped, mopping his drenched   
forehead with his shirt sleeve. "Comfortable---housing.."  
As things started to blur together as the air itself seemed  
to blaze, he crossed one foot over his leg, tripped, and  
connected with the sultry sand.   
  
Ifrit, Shiva, and Ramuh..it's HOT.  
  
He lay frozen in the bed of white fire. How'd this start, anyway?  
He had just finished examining a patient, and for leisure, he  
went fishing. Oh, right. Then Meteor hit Midgar.  
Mideel's off the coast of the mainland. Not far enough to   
escape its impact. The Mideel doctor was carried off by a  
tumultuous wave and was never heard from again.  
  
Finding himself on the other continent with his boat adrift, he'd wandered into  
the Gold Saucer at the Ropeway station, sponging the colorful lights  
and gay music wafting through the amusement park. Not three steps into  
Speed Square and someone had a problem with the way he  
was looking at him, and before he knew it, one thing led  
to another and a few wrong words, a few wrong moves, and   
the mild Mideel doctor had the man's knife shoved through  
his gut. The explanation couldn't come through coherently  
pressed against the floor, and the one-way transport sent  
him into Hell.  
  
What a way to die.  
  
He didn't brave the wilds of medical school to die innominate  
in a desert prison an ocean away from home.  
  
But, that's what it looked like his end would be.  
As he cooked in the scorching heatwave,  
he barely noticed a faint scuffle of claws against the   
sand. It was joined by another pair, lighter, more agile.   
White eyes full of anguish burned as hot as the sand  
they trod. The four glowing orbs permanently carved into  
narrow slits of hate fixated on the melting human. The lighter  
approached him with a sideways bound, whisking the broad  
side of its claws along the pitiful lifeform's back. It snapped  
its head up level with the other's, growling ferally. The   
other, which was burdened with a load of some sort, crouched on its belly and turned its head sideways to  
see the human, as if.....OBSERVING the motionless body. It  
hopped over and around the man, repeating this movement with  
skillfullness and a degree of dexterity. Biting down on its set of jagged  
teeth, it returned the feral growl, in, if one listened   
closely, a commanding tone, and the lighter one clasped  
its clawed limbs around the torso of the human, slung him  
over its narrow shoulderblade where folds of sickly-colored  
skin hung dead and shrivelled. With a wild screech, both of  
them took off in the direction of the prison, leaving a   
dust cloud behind their deformed bodies sprinting nimbly   
across the boiling sea.  
------------  
Does the heir to prosperity eventually come to   
resemble the old city? Is it its own or a different   
establishment? Is it only the inevitable pattern that results  
from any one center of economic and military wealth?  
Who could know? In any case, Lower Junon continued to  
exist. Not separated by the Midgar Plate, but by a creaky  
elevator.   
  
Junon had carried the tradition of a rift between  
wealth and poverty. Drawing the line not amongst  
humans, but between man and beast. The Shin-Ra SOLDIER  
who still guarded the elevator remained petulant as ever,  
demanding a higher fee of twenty gil. There was no currency  
in Lower Junon to begin with. The humans had a bit of   
industry, but the non-humans had none. They came there to  
survive, to live, to eat. To kill. The smog-strangled appendix of Junon  
had one rule: chaos.  
  
People lugging briefcases and checking their watches every   
few steps passed the center of the city without much thought.  
The people of Junon were mummies, wrapped up in their daily  
affairs, and coated with the resin of the comfort of walking  
the clean, freshly-paved streets. Especially those who worked  
for Shin-Ra. Considering it had a hereditary monopoly on all industry,  
that was pretty much everyone, except for the occasional private  
business, too small to compete with Shin-Ra, while at the same  
time making a sizable profit. But who WOULDN'T want to work for  
Shin-Ra these days? It was safer. Why invest in a potentially  
disastrous venture when security and stability beckoned?  
  
"You don't need to."  
Her office-softened hand gripped two phones, both on opposite  
sides of the desk. Papers were scattered across it, and she   
wedged one of the phones between her ear and shoulderblade   
while writing something. "Seventeen more hours? Damn!" The  
ballpoint pen refused to yield any more ink, and she rummaged  
in a cyllindrical penholder for another one, and continued to  
write where she left off. "No! Not you. Stupid--pen--broke--  
I'll get back to you." The rotor blades of the distant chopper  
on the other line faded to her ear as she resumed the earlier  
conversation. "I want him alive--better  
not give Shin-Ra a bad name---on the double---they'll reach  
Wutai at the same time you reach the Costa del Sol port?  
Bring him in so we can figure out what to do with him--Okay--   
Forget about the landing space--Goodbye."  
  
Elena crashed both phones on their cradle and flopped her   
head on the back of her pillowy swivel chair. IT was times like  
these she wished she was a Turk again. But no, she was the  
acting president of an entire company.   
  
No, not acting. She was the PRESIDENT of Shin-Ra Electric  
Company. She didn't like this new side of her. Progress, change..  
If she was just plain, regular, Elena, the loud and boisterous  
Turk, everything would've been so much simpler.   
  
Face it, you're liking this change. You like the power,  
you like ordering Reno and Rude around, you like doing things  
for YOUR city, hell, you like the carpet.  
  
But who was going to do it? Not Reno. And he goes off and  
gets drunk all the time in rebellion. Not Rude. Where Reno   
was, Rude was. Things didn't get DONE in pubs. She missed   
their liberty, but SOMEONE had to take the role of the fat  
corporate executive with a pipe in his mouth and a wad of  
cold cash in a wallet the size of the Zolom swamp.   
  
She wasn't fat. Come to think of it, though, she'd been  
harsh on not only Reno, but the office workers, too. She   
felt like apologizing...to Reno, at least. Maybe in private  
where no one else could see her out of exec mode.   
Dropping her pen, letting it roll to the edge of the desk,  
she stood and walked to the panoramic window that allowed her  
the best view of the city..her city. Why'd it have to be  
HER city? Elena drew back from the window and slumped into   
the chair. "Too early to think," she groaned. Crossing her arms  
on the desk's polished surface, she shoved her head in and  
didn't sit up again until there was a buzz on her private  
intercom.   
  
She became the fat executive again.  
---------  
The naked land remained cold and unresponsive as  
the soles of Lucrecia's old shoes beat upon them  
with cautious deliberation. Not every step was calculated,   
but she made few choices in her life without logic backing   
them up. Her eyes of dark almond stabbed through the  
pervasive pollution that hung in close proximity to Midgar,  
no doubt having generated from the noxious maw of the city.  
The former Shin-Ra employee walked further away from the  
wrecked metropolis, plunging herself deeper into the  
territory of the Custom Sweepers. She could see this early  
on: their fuel blotted parts of the bald earth. As they  
grew more frequent and in great quantity, her steady fingers  
slid to grasp her Winchester. A few steps more and she was  
upon an actual Custom Sweeper. Split and sparking, its  
wires hanging in disarray out of its ducts, tufts of fur  
laying in a wreath about the machine.   
  
"Kalm Fangs..." she stated, her apprehensive gaze scanning  
the green horizon. "Their migratory patterns are changing," she added, noting  
their current presence so near Midgar. She moved her index finger to the  
trigger, tensing as she smelled the Fangs in the thick air.  
"I should..go another way," she resolved after a few   
moments. Their presence was overwhelming: their quietness  
might have been a planned ambush. With Kalm Fangs, she  
could never tell. Backing away, her Materia ready, her  
weapon loaded and aimed, and her Ribbon rippling in a   
dead breeze, she retreated nearer to Midgar, until she  
passed by its border, reaching the same position  
she was at when moving foward. But..the pungent smell  
of not only Kalm Fangs, but another animal attacked  
her nostrils. She was about to retreat again, but...this  
other smell...she could taste it, but its identity escaped her.  
Driven by both her search and the unsatiable thirst for  
scientific knowledge, she made her way towards the   
source of the smell. It grew, it strengthened, and then,  
sounds: snarls, growls, weak and barely audible, but  
ferocious in tone. Each step brought her closer, closer,  
closer still, and then she saw shapes, a shape, one, two,  
three. Could it be? "Hojo?" she whispered to the air.  
Her walk quickened. The shapes grew definable, two  
of the outlines fringed with coarse Fang fur, and  
the other smooth-surfaced and broad. She approached   
nearer, and at last....she could see.  
"No...!" she protested, restraining sobs as a racking pain  
seared through her chest. The Kalm Fangs were chomping  
on a dark green tentacle flecked with yellow. Its hue, its thickness, it was  
all unmistakable. "You..you're stronger than that, Hojo.  
Jenova..MADE you stronger," Lucrecia told herself with  
rising despair. Something overtook her. Was it that long dead emotion  
she dare not name? Indeed, was she doing this out of  
fear that her SPECIMEN was made prey? That couldn't be it. He was  
her husband, guilty of AT LEAST one atrocity for the sake of   
advancement. But surely, it wasn't..love. Whatever it was,  
Lucrecia acted. Trancelike, she advanced towards the  
Kalm Fangs, and plugged both of them with the deep report  
of the Winchester. Breaking into a short-winded jog,  
she checked the remains of the silent animals, lifted up the half-chewed   
tentacle, and examined where it was severed. She cringed  
in horror: it had been bodily ripped off. Anger flashed  
in her globes of brown, but dissipated into a remorseful  
mist. "Where was the logic in that, Lu? They would be  
better as specimens.." She gently closed her eyes.  
"Age is catching up.." And she opened them, marble-hard, scraping  
against the squalid skies.  
"It's about time, Jenova." The woman didn't let go of the  
tentacle, absent-mindedly still holding it as she lifted her  
foot to walk...and heard something soft splash beneath her shoe.  
Turning over the sole, she looked at it. A luminous substance,  
transluscent and thin. "Jenova..." With a   
clearer mind she held the tentacle in her hands, and watched  
the violet blood drip down, falling into the puddle of Jenova  
that spread into a puddle at her feet. She followed it with her eyes,  
both alarmed and relieved at the blood trail that snaked towards  
Kalm Town. "He's left something to follow him by...but.." Her  
eyes widened, twin spheres of dread. "Shin-Ra, Ms. Lockheart..." She started to move  
swiftly along the trail. "..the CAPTAIN..they will follow it,  
too." Her feet grew steadily faster as the purple trail  
continued on, thinning to a mere string of drops and broadening  
again, keeping constant hope and despair balanced precariously on the escarpment of  
certitude.  
  
To be continued...... 


	8. The Elderly Are Young

Legal Stuff: All characters, objects, and places related to Final  
Fantasy VII are copyright to Squaresoft. This is a beginner's   
work and nonprofit, and any similarity in plot to other fanworks  
is coincidental.  
Hi! Thanks for reading the sequel to Black Soul of Green Eyes.  
Note: I'm aware of Princess Artemis' description  
of what a Mako monster should look like. It's hard to describe completely  
without recycling the details, such as absence of a nose, white  
eyes, etc. Just to let you know, I didn't copy  
her in any way, shape, or form. Besides, hers is much, much, MUCH  
better. Note2: This isn't becoming a Vincent fic. ! Never!!!  
started: 9/21/02 finished: 9/28/02 modified: 9/28/02 re-modified: 10/8/02  
Rated: PG for profanity.  
  
Repent Or Live  
  
by Blue9Tiger  
  
VIII: The Elderly Are Young  
--------  
Escape is harder when the guard is the sun herself. She   
laughs from the heavens, donning her golden crown of scalding flame to spite  
one who has despaired, but hasn't given up. Those she  
pleasured in broiling crisp and throwing to the Planet.  
  
A cascade of water fell on the burning face of the grey, middle-aged man,  
who opened his eyes. Weariness turned to horror as  
his vision cleared with the quickness of a sloth, and found himself looking directly up  
at the demon heads.  
  
Bolting upright, he vaguely noticed that he was on a makeshift  
table composed of two chairs with the ends together. As if he  
was going to be..operated on..he felt sick. Not from the pervasive  
heat that crept up on him and evaporated the cooling water droplets,  
but from this horrific image spilling into the forefront of his  
mind.  
  
The two creatures hovered over him, the smaller holding a  
canteen in its twisted hands. A feral grunt from the larger, a sound choked and abrupt, tipped  
the container, and the precious flow was wasted on the wood. It glared  
at the floor, where the terrified man eluded the water.  
A fierce snarl flew from the first Mako monster, and calculatingly  
it hurdled the chairs and deftly clapped its hand on the  
human's head. The other followed, bringing both the container and  
the unknown load. Out of overwhelming fear he violently jerked away,  
and for the first time, bringing his gaze level with the spawn  
of Hell, human face a hair's away from those of loathsome demons.  
  
It was only one brief, glancing moment that they were eye-to-eye.  
But that moment branded his mind with an indelible fear. Now, he  
could see them plainly with no distortion of blurred eyesight or  
illusions sharpened by distance.  
  
Their visages were perpetual masks of repulsiveness and loathing,  
a hollow cavern in the center of their face showing the barest  
semblance of part of a nose bridge, the face itself  
lacking symmetry and proportion, one side larger than the other,  
caved-in and buckling under its own crude shape, magma-hot  
eyes devoid of pupils and irises, white, not the ice glow of   
viridian or aqua, but colorless, the purity of  
evil, an extra ingredient transcending the abnormality of Mako green  
amd blue, changing them to white. Razor-edged fangs fixed in an unchangeable grimace of  
the most menacing of devils, brutality written in that twisted  
snarl, deep chasms streaking the drawn, sunken cheeks, two   
depressions where human ears would have been, sinking level with  
the broadening of the middle cavern, the neck bent not only at  
the base, but at the middle, enabling it to rotate the vile  
head three-hundred-sixty degrees, its shoulders drawn up to   
the jaw, its arms long and wiry, at its end curved digits  
which claws protruded in place of nails, curved downward,  
an unexpected change that had proved favorable: a disobedient  
one only had to be made to ball its fists to puncture the palm,  
from which the bones showed, indeed, the whole length of the  
arm the bones were prominent, the folds of skin concealing them poorly,  
and the legs, bent and squat, retracted, the chest, vulnerable  
to attack, as misshapen as every other part of their body, and   
the back....curved inward, moving in an unnatural slope towards   
the rear of the head, yielding to the touch, the skull inside   
bendable, shapable, pliable, as much as any of their bones were..as much  
as THEY were able to be physically changed into monstrosities whose  
conception was beyond their most vivid, terrifying nightmares...and this form of concealment, thin, sallow   
skin, muddled hues of whites and yellows, a pattern that rendered  
them all the more hated...  
  
No amount of screaming was going to help you in Corel. So he  
waited for the inevitable in silence. The grip of death was   
stamped on his forehead. And yet, it bore close resemblance to   
the type of care that a doctor gives his patient...  
  
What are you thinking? Are you hyperthermic from the heat?   
They will kill you. That's why they're feared. People fear..things  
that..CAUSE death.  
  
It removed the marred appendage from the cooling flesh, and  
signalled the smaller to pour again. Water droplets colliding with  
his scalding tongue.   
  
Innocuous.  
  
He looked into their eyes, two scalding chasms. Behind the bestiality  
there was that same unalterable concern that he showed his own patients.  
  
A disjointed memory. The elder of the Shin-Ra scientists.  
  
He closed his eyes and stopped struggling. Don't think...let them  
alleviate the nauseating heat..or intensify it ten times more. But  
don't look at the lurid specters.  
--------  
Drowning. Salt of the sea flooding lungs, the door to air   
sealed above a head, locked away from the sustaining  
oxygen exceeding the value of Materia. Descent into the belly  
of the sea. If the desert was the behemoth, the ocean was   
the leviathan. It gorged on those that befell its unparalleled  
strength. The combative forces of technology broke its power,   
but it made a meal off those who forged ahead in its midst   
unprotected by the silver shield of progress. Very rarely the vulnerable prey escaped.   
When they did, they were hurled onto a foreign land. Fortune smiled  
with caustic malice at this rejection by one force and acceptance  
by another. So was the price paid for being ejected from the sea.  
  
Nanaki awoke, dry, stripped of alertness, prone, brain in disarray,  
and attacked by falsities of the light; there was the blood cape  
of the laconic AVALANCHE member. The lupine/feline warrior bounded  
from the bed, a singular golden slit resting on the one-armed man  
with even tension. He witheld a snarl, silent in his risen wariness,  
waiting..waiting for the illusion to disappear. But, it didn't.  
It only grew more real, an imaginary chest rising and falling,  
akin to the near imperceptible whispers of a wind robbed of its  
brutish breath. That clinched it. Deceptions of the eyes didn't  
breathe.  
  
"Vincent," Nanaki decided, his coiled position melting into  
a state of ease. When he was met with the customary silence,  
he snuck about the small but ornate room. These strange yet   
implacably familiar surroundings heightened his bestial instincts  
again, and his tail shot up, quaking anxiously at the lurking  
threat. "Grandfather is right." Nothing but the voiceless  
whisper. "The Planet didn't come for you."  
  
There was a lengthened hiatus in the exchange as Vincent   
swivelled so that his back faced Red, with a gliding motion so fluid  
one could swear he hadn't used his feet. With his right hand he  
drew the second firearm that hung menacingly from his ammo belt.  
It was gun with barrels on opposite ends, the second firing  
derisively at his torpid soul every waking moment of his empty  
existence. "It comes for some...not others."  
  
An echo from the past that couldn't be neglected clashed  
with the feathered beast's enumeration.  
  
Dawn comes  
  
"I'm grateful the Planet-   
  
for some  
  
"-left some-"  
  
But not others  
  
"of us behind."  
  
The rancor of his words still tortured him  
in his nightmares.  
  
Eyes flooded with that incandescent green he abhorred,  
the only explanation for his tormentor's irrevocable crimes.  
Mako..that was no excuse.  
  
Dawn comes for some but not others.  
  
The Death Penalty.  
Blood everywhere. The imminent void unhinging its jaws to  
engulf him.  
  
How inane of me..the dawn will come.   
  
Hack. No sleeping gas, no sedatives. Left to lie in his own blood.  
The arm. That piece of brass and tin and copper plated with gold:  
Gold, precious, scarce, a treasure...a blessing. From Hell. Every  
day afterward he woke to see this grinning ghost of a limb.  
  
Not for you, but perhaps...for your shadow.  
  
Eyes stained with blood. Every motion as laborious as   
a minute hand behind the hour hand by an eternity. Speech set back centuries earlier..  
as if he was meant to be the vampires of archaic lore.   
  
I mean that in the fool's sense, of course.."Figuratively"..  
  
An acerbic sneer, returned only with the helplessness of  
a labrat. And then..the injections. Green and violet blended  
to BECOME him. There the beasts were locked in the pillaged temple.  
And every horrendous step of it premeditated and carried out with  
as much cruelty as the human heart could hold.   
  
I doubt that you've remained diurnal after my gift. It doesn't  
matter: it wasn't my intention.   
  
And the sealing.  
  
You deserve an..interminable  
rest after participating in my research.  
  
How could he forget the sealing?  
  
Pleasant dreams, Valentine.   
  
Forgotten, abandoned to his eternal expiation for the guilt that Hojo had  
heaped on him with unwarranted acrimony. He laid there for three  
decades.  
  
He'd be silent for three more if Red hadn't derailed the   
haunting train.  
  
"Where is this place?"  
  
"Wutai," Vincent replied in his invariable monotone, and   
exited the room with little else to say. Nanaki followed   
him, the bottom of his paws noiseless on the imported wood  
and his fiery tail besting the artificial light that brightened  
this part of the town that served as an inn. At the foot of the  
stairs, the mercenary waited, busily shaving the feathers off  
of a Thunderbird. Then the two children of red appeared in the entryway,  
one with cape billowing void of emotion in the stolid Wutaian breeze,  
and the other with his bright fur raised at the sight of a weapon.  
But he was soon eased. This was another one who hadn't been claimed  
by the Planet, an ally and a companion. His fur didn't bristle at   
allies. He learned they weren't staying at Wutai, headed instead  
back to the mountains.  
  
"Meteor left everything untouched. Did Holy work?" Nanaki asked  
himself, looking out past the high mountain into the sea that  
had brought him here among comrades, but away from...It stuck  
him with the force of his Diamond Pin. He sprinted towards Vincent  
and Cloud, clearing the width rope bridge with a bound and  
gripping the broad rock with his short claws, scraped the mountainside on his haunches before springing  
outward and catching the edge of the shoreline with almost regal  
poise. He arched his neck, sighting the marble-like Vincent   
motionless next to the pitched tent. Nanaki raced towards Vincent  
and broke his run at the edge of the stumpy cliff that dropped  
into the sea below. "I didn't mean to come here." He pointed  
across the water gap with his snout, his tied bundles of hair that  
hung from either side of his head waving in the rough Wutai mountain winds.   
"I have to come back to my people. I promised to defend them."  
  
Where Vincent would normally be silent he spoke, in a  
cryptic and obscure way.  
  
"We make promises and never fulfill them."   
  
Nanaki heard him laugh. It was so rare that he did this that  
whoever heard him accomplish this incredible feat didn't   
remember how the preceding laugh sounded. But, they were all  
the same: they reeked of acridity. "Ha-ha..They are never  
satiated, not even after the Time arrives."  
  
The lion/wolf opened his mouth to reply, but the crash of the  
sea derailed his sharp locomotive. He knew he had to get home..  
back to where the Corel Reactor still ran strong. But, there were  
no ships, water or air, between Wutai and his land. The aftershock of Meteor   
assured that much. Had he FACED the Mako monsters..razed them as  
he did countless other enemies, he wouldn't be this far from his  
domain. Crossing the human's shadow, he stood before the sea,  
forcing himself to not feel ashamed that he failed to uphold  
Seto's honor. His howl spread through the stony mountains and out  
to the pounding leviathan.  
-----  
The grey sub languished on the surface. Below, the sealed passageway  
that would allow them to navigate around the shoreline. Ahead, Wutai,  
but unreachable: they were stretching for a goal that was impossible  
to reach...without taking drastic action.  
  
Savage waves crashed against the worn plates of the solid  
submarine. It rocked slightly with the vicious foam, pulverizing  
the metal, impervious to the force of nature it was built to  
withstand.  
  
Moved by a stringent order, the small beast began to move,   
the spray of white foam breaking against its nose. It roared  
with uncompromising intention, and smashed through the wall  
of ocean, piling up knots until the shoreline was in view.  
They drew closer, shortening the distance between them and the  
hulking shore.   
  
They struck the shallows. A thick grinding was lost amongst  
the din of the waves. And once more, the beast languished.  
-----  
Midgar's skies smirked with envenomed tenacity. Insincerity and lies   
fermented amongst the lead clouds.  
  
"Holy hellfuck."  
  
Cid had grown up inside the underbelly of the metropolis. The  
violet-furred balls of snarling hate known as Kalm Fangs he was  
unused to seeing. They prowled around the rent skeletons of the Custom  
Sweepers, their tongues hanging deprived of flesh from their mouths,  
their own hide outlining the gaunt frame of their skeletal structure.  
  
"We can take them," Tifa confirmed, lodging two Materia in   
her Crystal Glove. Her scurrilous companion stared at her somewhat  
dubiously, but raised his Partisan anyhow, clouding the air  
with tense, smoky breath.  
  
Reno and the Turks stood a distance away, uneager to make   
good the terms of their alliance with AVALANCHE. They weren't  
remotely ready to fight. This greatly set Cid aflame, but at that  
moment the Fangs charged, baying and howling like the very spawn  
of Cerebrus.  
  
"Take 'em, ya said?!" Cid sprang and cut the leader short,   
crimson blood painting the death upon the dead ground. "I fuckin'  
sometimes don't fuckin' get your friggin' optimism," Cid grunted irritably, meeting  
the crest of the wave with the deadly spearhead. The foam of  
blood blinded the onrushing Fangs, and flurry of them panicked,  
hurling themselves in Tifa's direction. She ducked the first  
and dispersed the rest with a Fire3, the opalescent orbs of fire  
frying them to a charred crisp. Tifa darted to join Cid, a flying  
Fang grazing her hip in the process. "Are ya asses 'gonna fight  
or what?!?" The spear was halted by a Fang, that bashed the blunt  
end of the Partisan in Cid's stomach. They gained the upper hand,  
and the swelling pack, greatly diminished, but too hungry to   
retreat, swarmed Cid and Tifa, tearing off the meat from their   
bare arms amidst a counterattack of a boot to the skull or the deadly spear.  
When their bodies were completely covered by the whirling mass of  
fury, only then did Reno give the signal. The two Turks rushed in, with him following close after,  
driving away the pack with their drill and club, once again mastering  
the bestial race.   
  
"Real smooth...where do ya get that booze? I want some," Reno  
snickered, sauntering towards the fallen AVALANCHE  
members with a sarcastic grin planted on his face.  
  
"Ya can bitch about it and all that shit," growled Cid a great  
deal weaker than usual. He had one hand gripped over the bloody  
ribbons of flesh and torn muscle that was his upper arm. "'Cause ya didn't fight."  
He rolled backwards as if somersaulting and vaulted onto his  
feet, wheezing from the blood loss. "Least ya can do is CURE,  
goddamnit!" he snarled, reeling from the pain that shot through  
the whole arm.  
  
Reno rummaged through his pants pockets and answered coolly,   
with casual indifference,  
  
"Rude's got the mastered Cure."  
  
"Son of a--"  
  
"Hey..relax, Highwind. I got one," Reno answered the rapidly advancing  
Partisan gripped by his adversary's free hand.  
The Shin-Ra executive jabbed a nail against the hard surface of   
the viridian Materia, and stretched his rod at the pilot, the Materia's healing  
energy restoring the ripped muscle and cementing the flesh, but failing to return the   
blood. He used Cure a second time on Tifa's arm, but it didn't take either  
of them long to figure out that Reno was only going to use it twice. Tifa groaned,  
anger flaring hot in her normally even-tempered eyes.  
  
"We truced---"   
  
"Yeah. Whatever," the red-haired man answered, bringing his  
rod over his knobby shoulder. He then pointed it at an enraged Cid. "Screw it. You're God with that  
big-ass spear. I 'gotta watch out for me and my Turks, ya know."  
  
Filled with resent, Cid roughly pulled off his oil-stained   
scarf with his unwounded hand, chomped on it, and ripped the coarse fabric in two with  
a yank, filling the silence with a hateful chain of curses. He bandaged the bloody arm with the shred of scarf, and  
chucked the other half at TIfa. The blood seeped through the  
dark material, but screw it, he wasn't going to bleed everywhere  
just to satisfy some personal vanity, not that he was vain to begin  
with.   
  
"Goddamn it, why'd ya hafta trust those shits?!" bellowed the pilot,  
stumbling foward with the blood seeping through the makeshift   
bandage. Tifa had no answer for him, weakened by the blood loss,  
and she trudged on, her feet like lead, wondering what she  
was thinking when she thought that for a moment Shin-Ra could be  
trusted to leave their deceit in the bag? But no..though Shin-Ra  
HQ was no longer, there was still AVALANCHE and still Shin-Ra.  
  
Bottom line: save your own neck, Tifa thought with loathing,  
and the divided party trekked onward after the very being they'd  
so recently agreed to find as allies and not foes. So much for that.  
--------  
The blood trail thinned. Hojo scraped his slime-coated belly across the angled rock  
underneath the same menacing sky, departing from present Kalm Fang territory onto earth whose deadness was so complete that not even desperate souls frequented it.   
  
It still hurt. Had he been wearing clothes, there'd be something  
between bare flesh and the ground. But as it was, he'd lost those  
on the Sister Ray long ago. Not only the bare broken shards of his sanity, but his clothes as well.  
As if he actually cared. He had other things to think about other than  
clothes. Things. What were things? Things that happened caused other  
things to happen.   
  
Compose yourself...this hampering of thought is a result of   
instinct's futile efforts to degenerate me. It will pass.  
  
Instinct..why instinct? It complicated  
things..it made human reason unnecessary and what was unnecessary  
could be ignored. But, it couldn't be said that those degenerating  
instincts ousted that precious faculty. No. If that happened, his  
mind would be blank and he'd be degraded to the lowest possible level of thought imaginable. But, that would never happen.  
  
After all, despite the marks of unguided bestial ferocity lacking any   
human mental power whatsoever, his intelligence   
wasn't something to be questioned for one reason and one reason alone: He was human.  
-------  
Nanaki snapped his eye opened and alert as the clear bang of  
the Death Penalty cracked the glass silence and roused him at   
the peak of dawn's blinding glare. He shook his coat, that had minor  
insects latching onto it. He blinked once. Vincent was still standing  
at the edge that protruded far out over the restless ocean. The winds  
whipped at his billowing cape, augmenting his already obcure aura.  
Nanaki never really wanted to know how this had been generated: he  
figured he'd be better not pry. Humans liked their enigmas.  
  
Soundlessly he approached, breaths controlled and inaudible,   
contrasting to the off-guard manner in which he plodded. He   
stared out over across the ocean, where his land was, very far  
away. There was a silence, but the animal soon spoke.  
  
"I need to get home," he started, rubbing  
flies off his face with an ungroomed paw, and sprawling into a   
tensed position, digging small holes in the earth below. "I have  
a promise to keep."  
  
The wind heightened to a blustery growl, scattering the man's dishevelled  
velvet hair across his face, which in the sun, appeared void of   
all color. He turned halfway around, his oddly vampiric countenance  
failing to faze Red. The underlying derision which he answered him with,   
however, did.  
  
"For a person of age you lack understanding. You are   
green for your years."  
  
The other let his jaw loosen and his mouth dried. For the year of his life that  
he'd been acquainted with Vincent, he never criticized ANYONE. He didn't  
know if it was to somehow ameliorate the burden on his soul, but   
whatever it was, it showed the first signs of dispersing. Coupled with the laugh...  
What was going on here? "You cannot return. There is no vessel."  
  
"My race has been loyal to the canyon for generations. I can't  
abandon it because there isn't a way to get there."  
  
He was steadfast, but the other was inflexible.  
  
"Loyalty. What does it mean? It will fade. All will fade," Vincent  
mumbled with phlegmatic monotone. Red found nothing to refute him,  
and simply sat there, anticipating the sight of humans riding  
a tumbling wave. His hopes escalated and crumbled: he was a   
creature of reason. If Vincent and Cloud were still here, well...  
  
Nanaki allowed himself to be dragged into a quiet despair.   
A fitful sleep greeted him, and he tumbled into a valley of nightmares  
amplified by the crashing sea.  
  
To be continued.... 


	9. Price of Neglect

Legal Stuff: All characters, places, and objects related to Final   
Fantasy VII are copyright to Squaresoft. This is beginner and nonprofit.  
Sorry for the lateness. OOC is unintended.  
restarted: 10/13/02 restarted: 11/12/02 finished: 12/5/02 modified: 12/6/02  
Rated: PG-13 for profanity.  
  
The restless clouds unleashed a faint sprinkle of putrid spray.  
They fell on that desensitized Planet, made callous by years of   
ongoing technological abuse. It was beyond healing itself. It had   
repaired itself in the past, patching minor wounds, striving to   
make itself whole again, but the exhaustion that the Reactors inflicted,  
the blood and sweat of exertion to withstand the constant assaults  
from this drainage were all too evident on the surface of the moribund  
Planet.  
  
How Junon thrived through this, the answer was the same as it   
was for Midgar before it: it was a civilization that lived on the  
regressing bounty of the Planet's blood. The city was a parasite,  
and the Planet its host bound by an unwritten contract that the  
Planet hadn't and never would agree to, but had been forced into  
submission to exist for the benefit of man and their vampiric  
machines.  
  
We still haven't learned, have we?  
  
IX: Price of Neglect  
  
Repent Or Live  
  
by Blue9TIger  
  
These acid rainfalls hadn't been bad above the Plate,  
where the rain pummelled the gargantuan skyscrapers and barely   
fazed those state-of-the-art pillars of technology. But in this open  
space, where there was nothing but defunct earth underneath remolded mountains, Lucrecia could  
feel its caustic bite, not enough to be dangerously corrsoive but  
acutely painful. Her eyes burned with the rain's keen teeth, the noxious chemical emanating from every  
droplet scorching her nostrils. Through tearing eyes she stared  
up at the clouds. A haughty thunder rumbled warningly.   
  
"Barometric pressure is decreasing..." Lucrecia concluded, staring at   
the menacing skies with a reflexive squint at the droplets of acidic water. "Lets hope the pH doesn't fall in direct proportion..." The bruising wind  
agreed with a hateful gust. Shelter was imperative. Already the puddles   
were spreading into pools, and the scattered droplets collected into a gradually thickening  
sheet.   
  
The imperious mountains that isolated Midgar from the sea on one side,  
the peaks of which sketched a dulled point that tumbled down as if it  
would sprawl into a valley, but ascended to a blunt, rounded peak, as they were aged  
mountains, and repeated this pattern, forming a chain that crossed the continent.   
  
This was three years ago.   
  
Even so, Meteor hadn't pulverized the mountains into oblivion, but   
shooting debris from the falling hell had scarred them permanently,   
carving gaping pockets on the slope, an empty and forbidding greyness.  
  
Lucrecia stared down at the blood trail with thin hope, and pursed  
her lips solemnly. Another thunderous echo cracked the silence. The revealing marker  
would be washed away indiscriminately. Therefore, she must use....  
  
It. If Jenova is present, it might be a biotic organism, and  
take on modified floral characteristics...  
  
Tentatively in accord with the third roar, she planted the tentacle  
that she had been safeguarding in her hands, onto the impermeable  
ground, snagging a breath in her throat.   
  
She slowly released it as her surmise proved itself: a plethora of smaller tentacles sprouted from the base, squirming and  
rolling beneath the heightening winds. They burrowed through the  
crust like many worms, and rooted the main   
appendage to the bare stone underneath. As droplets grew louder,  
beating harder against her clothes, the tentacle, and the ground  
below it, she tugged at it firmly, finding it held fast. The   
thread of hope thickening, she broke briskly for shelter. This marker's greater purpose she'd   
dare not think about, not until the storm subsided. If she  
couldn't find her marker, she would know what would have befallen H0512...  
-----  
Gangs of Whole Eaters descended upon the support beam like a swarming cloud, bending it  
beneath their combined weight, its resonating creak cracking the  
dead stillness of Sector 1 and rendering it alive with them,  
their dread squeal failing to stir the spirits of the obliterated   
Reactor.  
  
It was little more than jagged chunks of metal, partially devoured  
by the Mako, the very substance it was designed to drain from the unwilling Planet,  
laying crushed and corroded in the thirsty pit that coughed tangled vapors into the stagnant air, bathed in its cruel and unyielding fluorescence.  
As the slum-dwellers crawled past on the bridge of ruin, the blinding  
emerald reflected off the coarse hide of the monsters, before the path swung upwards and they   
moved out of reach from the Mako Reactor.  
  
Ah...the Mako Reactor..this bittersweet victory for AVALANCHE, the self-proclaimed  
saviors of the Planet who by everyone else were labelled terrorists.  
Three years ago they had taken down the first of Shin-Ra's once indomitable grip on Midgar, which was now long-forgotten,  
barren of either man or machine, infected with desolation and old death.   
  
The Whole Eaters scuttled past the forbidden nothingness, leaving a trail of  
emptiness in their wake for the nothingness to sustain itself. Away   
from the forbidding cloud of decay, they bowled through the black tunnels made in the junk  
where there was a space between this sink and that pipe, this window and that bathtub. As  
they wormed through the enormity of the debris, their continuous movement dislodged  
a few stray cans and bottles that gravitated towards the slovenly dwellings of the humans.  
  
They moved rapidly across the human territory, with no desire to linger there, labelled  
the most loathsome of monsters in Midgar, but having to cross in order to reach a food supply,  
though scarce, enough to prolong their lives for a day longer.   
  
Barret found himself waiting around for Tifa and Cid to come back in this sea of monsters, the sight of which he was no stranger to,  
as they were as numerous and plentiful anyone who'd seen better conditions  
longed clean water to be. Funny that, even though they were alive, they looked like rotting  
bodies.  
  
Bodies...the Whole Eaters reminded him of that day..the explosion, the  
enormous fire that swallowed up that Planet-killer...and half of Sector 1. All those lives  
along with ONE measly building, with seven more killing the Planet and THEN some...  
  
Was it really for the Planet, or was it only for Marlene?  
  
Marlene's dead.  
  
Did we kill all dem people for nothing?  
  
"Don' get bogged down in all 'dat shit." Barret smothered the gnawing gulit as the last  
of the Whole Eaters melted into the omnipresent darkness. "She's goddamn gone  
an' 'dere ain't no gettin' 'er back." Barret shook his good fist at the apathetic sky.  
"If 'dere were some god up 'dere she'd still be wit' me!!!" he yelled in an explosion of  
pure hatred. With the Whole Eaters gone there was heavy and overbearing silence. "Fuck dat!"  
With firm resolution Barret glared into the polluted sky and his gun-arm shot up.  
Every day of his life since Marlene left him he felt like killing the gods themselves.  
But life didn't work that way. You could only get your revenge on  
PEOPLE, and in turn they'd want revenge on YOU, and it went going on and on until  
the whole damn world killed itself.   
  
Barret came to a bitter conlclusion as he trudged back to  
the headquarters, firing a murderous glare at up..at what came  
from above to take Marlene. "Only 'ting yo' got in 'da world is yo'self an' 'da shitload 'a  
fuckwads 'dat're gunnin' fo' yo' ass!"  
  
------  
Huddled under the cracked wing of a mountain, the noxious blanket of acid rain battering an earth  
that was far too dead to scream in its millions of agonies, hungry  
but too afraid to hunt in this weather, cold from the dampness of the rock,  
draped with her labcoat over her shoulders, the rain menacing in its  
mockery of her inability to advance, to pursue the animal that was her  
husband. But her conscience was soon eased. She wrapped her  
fingers around her identification, turning over the grimy card  
with wobbly lack of dexterity, and bit her lower lip. "It's not  
exactly litmus paper..." She tossed it into the storm, and recoiled  
with horror as the acid rain devoured it. She wasn't going outside anytime soon. With awakened despair  
she drew her knees under her chin and pressed her face against the  
joints. But like the ice when confronted with the golden blaze,  
this surrender of hope melted into bare fear. "The Captain and Ms. Lockheart   
won't go back to Midgar until after they kill him.." She cupped her lowered chin in   
detatched bitterness. "They killed my son..Rain this acidic wouldn't  
harm them." She curled against the rough rock, bringing her head back  
up. A lashing wind compelled her to retreat farther into the indent.  
A white bolt of lightning split the sky. Her crouched form shifted  
in the following darkness. The deluge dragged on.  
  
She waited at the rim of Northern Crater. However many depths it reached,  
she saw as far as the center of the earth, and she saw Sephiroth, his corpse laying in the Planet's center, fallen   
from Olympus, from godhood, dead as the next mortal, this slayed deity,   
lacerated with the fateful edge of the Apocalypse, impaled with the  
blade of the Partisan, crushed with the weight of the Crystal Glove. Imagine...a lifespan  
that would span eons reduced to a puny chunk in the rolling rock  
of time. It sickened her every time she thought about it. The graphic  
retellings that she'd overhear..perhaps a triumphant memory of a   
climatic battle, but to her, the slaughter of her child. Though she  
wanted to move on and forget this, in her heart, an unforgivable  
crime.   
  
He spoke to her. She couldn't discern the words: there were no sounds:  
the cries of the ever-present beasts silencing what otherwise would be a tremendous  
echo. His bloodied lips mouthed one word over and over again, but she couldn't  
HEAR anything...  
  
She squinted further into the crater, watching the movement  
of the bloodstained lips.  
  
RE  
  
UN  
  
ION  
  
The warning of a mortal god?  
  
Lucrecia woke with chilling beads of sweat clinging to her  
damp skin. She peered out from the cove with her Mako-tinged eyes, ghostly apparitions leering  
at her through the pale emerald curtain. Residue of a dream. A haunting  
dream, but nevertheless, intangible, untouchable, insubstantial...  
  
It had no meaning.  
------  
Obsession. A driving and compelling force, causing men and beast  
to crumble, civilations to rise and those same to be crushed,   
life's walkways altered in a heartbeat.  
  
The lanky shadow spirited across the dimness. Locked on   
target it was a predator in the night. Its shape darkened the  
floor of fallen debris below it, plunging it further into obscurity.  
The shape was light in its glide, jealously guarding its stealth.  
  
It leaped down from a projecting support beam and landed  
feet-first, nimbly recovering from the distance and hurdling  
the junk heaps. From underneath the garbage shone a burning-out flashlight  
beam, bringing the slender figure of Yuffie to light.  
  
She neared the entryway grin wild and broad with anticipation.  
  
Yuffie was ever-vigilant for what she craved. Languishing  
in this dump for this long and still no sign of Materia?   
Wahaha..that was all about to change. She had spied it  
in the entryway of Shera's dingy shack she preferred to   
call a lab, helpless, unprotected...just the kind of Materia  
that was begging for an owner. Silent as the roaming spirit,  
she had the door open and was inside.   
  
She had seen Shera go in and out of this place a couple of  
times..nothing really special to look at. Now inside, it didn't look  
like there was much that would keep her there either, with the  
only thing of interest...to a scientist, and not a Materia thief, a bunch of glass domes and small cages,  
with weird things staring out at her. She flitted restlessly about the cramped room, lifting the smaller  
cages by their bases, a shrill uproar leading her to leave them  
to their solitude.  
  
"Dumb-----thingies--"  
  
She swung the Crystal Cross in an upward motion, bumping into  
one of the cages and catching a square of white blotted in black  
ink that showed its scarcity from the light lines that itermittently  
boldened.   
  
"This ain't Materia...just a dumb note!"  
  
Yuffie snatched it up and read by the puny red light given off from  
Leviathan nestled in the Cross. Her grumbles at the waste of time  
soon diminished as she went through the note aloud.  
  
"To Ms. Kisaragi and Mr. Wallace:   
Specimen list Diet   
  
Hedgehog Pie embryo (x1) Krakka Greens (x50 g/6 days)   
Whole Eater (x5) Leftovers  
Poodler Sample (x1) N/A  
Bad Rap Sample (x1) N/A  
S0164 (x1) N/A  
G0232 (x1) N/A  
V0516 (x1) N/A (Do not expose it to light)  
L0108 (x4) N/A (Do not expose it to oxygen)  
H0512 (x1) Leftovers  
  
"She nuts or somethin'?!" the kleptomaniac ninja exclaimed indignantly  
as she crumbled the paper into a ball and chucked it into a corner of the  
untidy lab. "Way she wrote it ya'd think she wants us to BABY-SIT for  
her creep-oids!" Scrunching up her face, she passed her eyes across  
the---it looked like a tank, labelled "artificial placenta", whatever the heck that  
was. She blinked her bulging brown eyes. "Wonder why Sher didn't  
tell us where she was goin' first..must've been in a hurry," she  
rationalized, jumping about the crowded room, disturbing the   
Whole Eater that glared at her with its narrow slits that contained  
menacing eyes. Green girl that she was, though a year  
past the age of adulthood, she mock-glared at it in return, the  
scorpion-like creature gliding into a darker recess of the  
tank it was in...if it could get any darker thanit already was.   
  
Grinning broadly in satisfaction, Yuffie skipped  
towards the back of the room, giving the lab a last sweep in case the object she'd seen HADN'T been the piece of paper. Then she  
She leaped into the corner of perpetual murkiness, her Crystal Cross promptly colliding into the cage door. With  
a startling clang that buried the silence for a prolonged moment, the door banged shut.  
As if the sudden sound made her recall a fact in her brain, she squealed, "Wah!! Almost got snatched by  
the-----"  
  
Her mouth fell agape in shock. If she hadn't understood why  
Shera had left her and Barret to care for her specimens, the severed  
chain and absence of anything in the cage required no further explanation.  
Faster than the Zolom strikes she dove out of the lab and flew   
towrds AVALANCHE's headquarters.   
------  
It was a dizzying cycle: the poisoned rain fell, ran off the  
callous ground, poured into the rivers, that emptied into the  
ocean, evaporated into the clouds, condensed, and fell..and so it  
began again.   
  
Cid hadn't felt miserable in a while.   
  
Here he was, his own blood seeping thorugh his scarf,  
without a lighter, without a match, and stuck in an acid-resistant..resistant, not acid-PROOF, tent with  
Ms. "We're gonna get out of this alright" Lockheart with the  
storm wilder than ever outside and without a clue where they   
were except that it wasn't any place you could get directions  
to get un-lost. And people actually WONDERED why he smoked? HAH!  
  
Normally, he could tolerate the girl. But pinpointing her  
as the source of this mess, Cid's normally fair irises froze to ice. He turned to Tifa,  
one hand clamped over his crudely-bandaged arm. The other   
backed up against the side of the tent, feeling more disillusioned  
than anything. With her good arm she swept the brown bangs  
off her forehead and let her head fall back on the tough material.  
  
"Hope yer REAL happy with yer half-assed decision, Lockheart,"  
Cid growled, kicking a leg foward to stretch out the muscles. Tifa  
visibly ignored him, not in a humor to hear a sermon. Her arm  
wasn't in a humor, either. "Trust Shit-Ra Inc. with yer  
lives when ya know they've been killin' th' Planet BEFORE I learned  
to fuckin' walk!!" It looked like Tifa was aBout to argue, but the  
pilot cut her off, the fury lines momentarily disappearing from his tar-eroded face.  
"Yep...dinosaurs were dead back then, if ya waere wonderin'." The fury returned. "Still ya know they go and fuckin'  
lie, break their goddamn promises, to save their own sorry-ass  
skins! And pretty damn quick, too!" He got up, his coarse blonde head brushing the tent. From habitual  
compulsion he reached in one of his pockets and stuffed the cigarette  
in his mouth unlit, and growled, "Fuck that!! I'm givin' that jackass  
a sock in his skinny-ass jaw---"  
  
"Wait, Cid--!"  
  
"He's gettin' it now, Lockheart!!" snarled Cid, whacking his gloved  
palm against the flap of the tent, trembling at the external storm.  
"That Turk's jus' BEGGIN' for an ass-kickin' by yours truly---"  
  
The pilot opened the flap, then closed it immediately, howling   
in a sharp fit of pain. He drew himself back inside with  
a scowl on his face. The storm was at its acme. There was no getting  
out and coming back in alive. As this dawned on him, he swore  
a profuse stream, cursing everything and everyone he knew.   
  
Today just wasn't his day.  
--------  
The eyes of Medusa burned with white fire on the white sands,  
already bombarded by the white rays of the white sun.   
  
The Mako Monster turned its twisted, mangled visage inward, its fangs locked  
together in a perpetual snarl. It flailed its head, slamming the   
door shut and squat on the floor. NImbly it crossed the room,  
the fierce claws barely passing over the quavering man. It   
missed raking his chest by mere millimeters. The dark rush of  
air left him with blood stone with terror.  
  
Words fueled by that same fear linked in a broken chain.  
He looked one of them dead in the eyes and stammered,  
  
"What d-do y-you want with m-me?"  
  
No answer. "Y-you've been keeping me alive this whole time.."  
No answer. "Why?" The question was fearful but even, in the face  
of Pluto and his moon. Slowly his perspiration swallowed him again,  
raising his temperature to dizzy heights, senidng his head spinning,  
completely aware that the fever once again gripped hold of him,  
which made it all the more...uncomfortable. And still..there was   
no answer. Swaying to one side to catch some hidden support,   
the Mideelian took an awkward step foward, wiping his damp forehad  
on his shirt sleeve. The two demons stared him in their threatening  
manner, but made no move. They had their hot gaze fixated elsewhere.  
The boiling sphere in the sky.  
---  
The man felt deathly chilled. Not internally; the fever must  
have subsided...but outside. The sweat had dried from his clothes  
so the ice air didn't penetrate the mostly hairless flesh, but  
a bitter wind blew through his shirt collar and between the buttons  
and across his face and hands. All through this there was a rise  
and fall, constantly, moving up and down, with his cheekbone knocking  
into something hard and calloused and...more frigid than the air.  
  
He opened his eyes to see the desert sand billowing into   
his face. His only conclusion was..that he was moving. As   
the sense of touch returned with the dissipation of numbness,  
he felt the flat side of five claws push into his stomach.  
  
Holy mother of Ramuh...   
  
The other beast ran adjacent to the one that hauled him  
across Corel. He stretched his neck up to see: nothing except  
for sand and dust in all directions in boundless amounts.   
The bare sky burned ice above, and the distant Corel Mountains  
loomed low on the unreachable horizon.   
  
Words snagged and dangled on his locked tongue. He let  
himself move limply along with the fluid motion of the   
demon. The claws on his stomach could easily be be turned  
inwards in a heartbeat. All he could do was wait for these  
deadly anomalies to stop.  
  
To be continued...  
-----  
CQF?: Hey! Sorry it took so long to get this one up. This  
chapter gave me trouble in particular..chapter 10 may flow  
smoother or not. 'Till then, this is B9T, a.k.a. RFOH,   
signing off! 


	10. Haze

Legal Stuff: All characters, objects, places, etc. relating to Final Fantasy VII a copyright to Squaresoft. THis is a beginner and nonprofit work. I'm not going to change this to fit the parameters of Advent Children, or the subsequent game pertaining to it. (I tried it once before and it was a DISASTER.) So, this is AU. Adding in own  
theories, not canon, only derived from parallels. It's probably been done before. OO  
started:3/27/03

Life originated from water. Not from the water that cascades over the rock, plunging into a roaring and raging abyss, but from water in its infancy, then toxic, clashing with the gases in the air baked by lightning and lava, sloshing in a stingy consistency over the volcanoes and upturning crust.

They are the souls of the dead, magnetized by each other in the suggestion of a hope--to be reunited with each other as well as the dust that bore them. Compression renders them all the more hostile to those that have life, something that they can never have again.

The vapors seeped through the bleeding cracks of the earth, pouring into the new cracks that the restless crust formed, reacting, compressing,combining---changing with the eons that progressed, transforming with the years and the new layers of crust that forced the conglomeration further underground.

Their place is in the underworld---the place of the dead.

At the planet's core the liquid matured into its current and most concentrated form, rendering the center of the planet uninhabitable by humans. At a certain depth in the earth, the abyss can no longer support life. Ocean under the ocean. This body more alive than the one that had existed in the shadow of Meteor. Luminiscent rivulets collected in

the mumerous cracks in the gravity-contorted heap of rock. This forbidding crest formed a high cliff separated stone that projected outward from the cloud of fleeing vapors that rose from the core---as old as the place was, it was forever restless.

It was here three years ago the angel had fallen. It was here now the angel would rise.

Wedged between two slabs of stone were traces of blood...or at least, what flowed like blood...The consistency was thinner, and was without the universal duality of water. Water nourishes and drowns, rots and revives. This was a toxin, pure and simple. It  
crawled down the Mako-laced edges and intermingled at the cliff's base. Yes, that was what it was, at first glance. Some bodily fluid a wretched child of the Planet lost when crushed by the collapsing chunks of stone. True, it was a child. And it had been reared for a glorious purpose, until death snatched it in mid-flight and dragged him down in his dripping blood. The contaminated blood. Jenova's life-force.

But had death truly taken it?

A jet-black wing broken at the crook erupted from a crack in the rubble, and something shouldered through the dead weight of the rock, boulders rumbling across the pile and

plunging into a Mako pit. It reacted with an outburst of vapor that lifted past the jagged

rip in the heaped stones, that lengthened with a clash of metal against granite that released sparks bursting through the shooting cloud. The strikes were continuous, and the

rock and ruin fell away with deft strokes that only a swordsman could execute---

All that was left to consider was if the Jenova monster deserved  
to be called a man.

A final swing pulverized the stones into scattered fragments and rising dust. The tip of the blade ground into the igneous slab below, beside which a scarred shape landed heavily. Perhaps he was too dignified to exhale that wracked breath building up in his lungs, one of which had been pierced with a thickblade made to hack into a bloody pulp rather than cleave—mark of the butcher rather than the executioner: the pawn's sword. Oh, yes, what a glorifying death..he raised his head at a rueful angle, images of his puppet and two other insignificants, that rushed at him with, as far as he was concerned---pointed sticks, against he who had the forces of heaven and hell in the palm of his hand..

They had thought to have slaughtered him, but the one-winged angel had returned.

And the gate to the Promised Land would be opened with human corpses staining the path to that glorious entrance.

AVALANCHE would've been the first to feel the blood-hot blade of the Masamune, if it wasn't for Jenova. She knew how to make her playthings miserable. She knew that one entombed secret that would stop Sephiroth in his tracks,perhaps hurl him into insanity like his..servile father. Or perhaps it would facilitate the death of AVALANCHE.  
Ah, yes...whatever the result, it would pleasure her, as she was married to misery.

Besides, the boy had bested her will and had retained it, going far enough to transcend  
her own power and use her to wage his battles. But now...she wanted control of the one SHE made great. And she would get control. It was certain.

Repent Or Live

by Blue9TIger

X: Haze

The battle scars of the former struggling town were now on a corpse. The venom glow  
of the shore illuminated the black haze choking the dissected cadaver. Through it, a shuffle of heavy footsteps--the lapse in their movements betrayed the fact they were heavily armed, but they'd have to be suicidal to not be.

It was Lower Junon, after all.

"Waste 'a good meat."

The voices were the typical urban Gaian. Time with its eye on them. Counting away their lives.

"Ya won't die from a bit 'a Mako." The first one had one foot rooted on the shore, looked like he was going to wade in the poison. Dumb fuck. For a piece of bad meat.

"A bit?"

The tentative meal was drowned, drenched in every pore with the stuff. A grumble from

the overturned gravel, a dirt-encrusted hand groping through the haze towards the toxic waters.

"Fuc--" he spat as he felt a dull crack sear through his chin and a rattle in his skull as a rock smashed into his scalp. He rebounded and decked him in the ribs, leaving him in the mud.

"I'm willin' to eat shit if it means I'm gonna live tomorrow."

"You dive in there you die quick--" A muted splash, a gurgle."--I'm not gonna go in there to save your ass!"

He dragged up the carcass from the muck-coated bottom, throwing the meat on the

gravel, crammed with Meteor debris, the gutted ruins from the houses, the remains of their tenants, and animal feces from the survivors that fought to the death for prime parts

of human meat. Not to say they left the bones to bleach: they consumed those, too. If there were remains there, the corpse would be a mere few hours old. At least the place

wouldn't be rank with death, if it was any consolation.

That the corpse was even there meant two things: it was new and it died out in the water. Wasn't long before the first guy ripped it apart, chewing through the raw meat, blood, Mako, cartilage, and all, before keeling over himself. The scarce sun barely set before the second devoured his fellow, going as far to gnaw his way through his ammunition belt, tossing only the Mako-gorged innards to the lurkers with tougher

stomachs and more vicious appetites.

None of this meant much to the human at the border. The SOLDIER that had guarded the elevator in the past now charged 20 gil for upper Junonians to go down to tour the place..at their own risk. Those people were dying to die. Hell, the only reason he survived was that he stayed inside the elevator, getting his food from upper Junon. If

Lower Junon was a crap town before Meteor, afterwards it became Hell. Mako pollution castrated the town. If the psychos there were suicidal enough to stay, they croaked from the bad air. They said MIDGAR was bad. But Junon was the receptacle for all of Midgar's extra smog that it couldn't hold anymore. It dumped it in lower Junon. You could at least live in Midgar, even if you were gonna die  
early. Junonians didn't have that long. A week, tops.

And as for the monsters that took over from the outside----every time he opened the elevator door to let willing screwballs go get their heads chewed off, he could swear  
that they looked more fucked up than when they first crossed into Junon. The Condor men were getting to look sick, too. Just a matter of time before they got Mako poisoning and joined the lower Junonians.

The fight to live. Not that they're going to win it. Not when they're hungrier than you.

Oh, look...there's Mr. Dolphin. Now he's gone. Two wrestle for it. The victor devours both.

"20 gil to ride the elevator." He looked at the eager-eyed thrill seekers. "Your life's that cheap?"

---

Yuffie's usual jaunty mood was burdened by this revelation's gravity. She crossed the labyrinth of ruin with an unusual urgency ground into her quick, stealthy movements, any light-heartedness that usually marked her presence absent from her step.

And who'd know the Prof was out free where he could bring that guy with the one wing back and wreck the Planet--ehck, screw the Planet, Sephiroth'd wipe THEM  
out, she concluded in an unusual display of de-centered thought.

She surged foward with unusual heaviness---who wouldn't be after witnessing the near-destruction of the world that gave her the air and water to continue her plunder?  
The thought distracted her, and she took a dive when a hard land crushed a Whole Eater nest underfoot. She turned her eyes groundward and saw their sickly remains  
oozing wasted innards. And it's not like down here the people met better ends than the monsters. You'd think that with Shin-Ra gone, that would change. Not that she felt close to these bums, but living with 'em for three years, it was pretty hard to ignore after awhile. So, maybe she lost her total freedom boarding this train there was no getting off of. As her allies she couldn't steal from them. Heck, she didn't even get the  
Materia after Meteor. And yet, battling through the Northern Crater for this unwinnable cause appealed to her in some sick way.

But where was this cause? The Planet's dead. She saw the outside a few times. The land was naked. They saved the Planet? Uh-huh. They saved it, alright. Its skeletal remains.

So what did she care if Hojo had gotten loose and used Sephiroth to wreck the Planet more? What WAS there to wreck?

"A ratty dump," Yuffie answered herself.  
She climbed the low side of the pile of ruin with simian agility, snatching the edge and pulling herself onto it in the time it takes to get shot in Midgar. The view was stunning in its lifeless bleakness.Her bewildered eyes ran over the assortment of dilapidated shacks visible from the elevated point. To them she yelled with a bizzare questioning look,

"Why do ya even bother!"

Some of the healthier ones had spirit in them to shout cusses at her, others with weapons found that as the clearest answer. Before they nailed her, though, she cartwheeled into the shadows.

Why even bother? She could just leave the Leviathan-cursed joint and hunt for Materia full time instead of making a rain check with death. Long as she stayed down here sooner or later it'd get impatient. Wasn't the lifespan fifty years ago 75 or so? Now she was seeing thirty-something's walking into their graves.

Hell, what did it matter? SHE was still alive. Nothing could bring HER down. Who cared about the rest? Yet..Yuffie kept her course for AVALANCHE headquarters. Why? She could've bailed out. Blew out of Midgar forever. To Nibelheim, Icicle Inn---wherever. Who knew, maybe she finally did give a damn for someone else besides herself. Or maybe Midgar still swarmed with Materia; she just hadn't found it yet. Maybe it was becasue embarking into the unknown would be suicide. Whatever her motives were, it kept her on the Train.

She climbed the last wall of trash, hurled herself off the brink, and touched down behind the resevoir. No sooner she landed when she heard the hollow sound of a heavy object connecting onto thinly covered bone, and saw the squirming shadows of Whole Eaters that wriggled up the grimy walls of the resevoir only to crumple on the dirt with their skulls bashed in and bits of their primal brain piling up on the ground. The remaining Whole Eaters skulked back into the shadows, Barret shooting a furious glare at splattered remains and then at the vat of water..

"Goddamnit!" he erupted at the greenish fluid spreading on the already-clouded surface of the water. "Dey jes' godda pick DIS spot ta piss in!" He hurled a frustrated kick at the latrine, its putrid contents sloshing at the bottom. The rankness of it swallowed the polluted air and spewed new vapors invaded by this rancid mixture of urine and Mako  
and a whole shitload of other malodors. "Nobody's gunna live long if dey drink dis shit." He turned his solid weathered head and stared straight at the ninja. "Ya know where dere's good water---" Above the Plate. Outside of Midgar. Where the river crossed with the ocean. Long, deadly trek. A long, deadly trek for someone else's benefit.

Eh... The stink was getting her nauseous.

Yuffie shook her head in the affirmative, twisting the Crystal Cross in her hand and checking its Materia, a few green, mostly vermillion.She had flipped onto the base of the junk tower, catching Barret's serious-as-hell look as she landed on the rust-devoured  
pipe. "Don' sell out on us---" A threat and a plea at the same time. Big muscle and tough talk only barely hid a bleeding heart. "--dey're gonna need it bad way befo' ya come back." Yuffie returned him a half-hearted wink and a verbal assent and scaled the steepened front of the trash mountain, wondering is she'd lost all her marbles to agree so unconditionally on this. Then again, there were no rewards to reap if she refused.

Barret was left there, amongst the monstrous remains. The scattered innards were

unsettling,almost haunting."It ain't a man.."But ah'm sick 'a killin'..Too many damn lives

wasted already. Barret nudged the bodies out of the wayof the human tide with the side of his worn boot. He couldn't stop what they wanted to do: take a drink. No warning would keep their mouths out of that bad water: he could threaten to shoot the lot of them and it wouldn'tve made any difference. Besides, they'd be drinking blood.

Words fell on obstreperous ears that only wanted to hear the water running  
down their throat, contaminated or not. Barret's booming bellow was drowned out in the noise. He was thirsty: they all were. Cracked, dry voices clamoring in unison like a horde of  
children.

"I haven't eaten or drank nothin' since I come from Sector 4," growled someone with his face full underwater, leaning over the rim and sucking up a festering disease. He rubbed his mouth on a tattered sleeve and said, dead-set in his decision. "If this is good as it gets you can't keep me from drinkin' it."

Desperate, wanting children.

A biting tenor barked through the diseased air--someone growled over them with wide-eyed accusation at the big North Corelian: "What's the matter, Wallace? Ya let the  
slimesuckers piss in it, didn't ya? This is how AVALANCHE is takin' care of us, huh?"

A murmur of assent from the Midgarians.

"Sure, we got weapons. But we gotta eat. We're good as gone..."

"AVALANCHE tries good, but it ain't fixing anything."

"We want food.."

The murmur swelled into a deafening groan. The larger cut of the men lost their words--it was only sounds, as they lunged for him, not in a mob--for a mob is driven by a few who are deliberate in their attack, but a moldy sea of basic, primal humans, the few ones that kept their wits backing off a bit, brandishing their rusted daggers and broken hatchets.

"Those fucks cin barely talk--"one of them grinned derisively with a snort. "So a'll talk for'm. Lets ditch AVALANCHE." As his teeth clamped together a glint nicked  
the grimy haze.

"Cen take 'dese shitholes," Barret grumbled, thrusting his Solid Bazooka at the ass pack. He hated doin' this. Hated it. He wasn't no killer. Why's it gotta be 'dis way..? Always 'gotta come down t''dis.

A suit's flash and a loud, authoratative firearm shot toward the sky stopped the enviromental activist-turned- terrorist-turned-Planet's savior from plugging every one of the shit-talking dissenters.

"Back off, Mr. Wallace." A burst of fire ensnared Barret's inside as the bald, crisply-dressed Shin-Ra barrelled into the reeking mass of flesh and hair. I'll handle this,"

-------

A good scrubbing eliminates the harmful microbes teeming on every portion of a surface. Regular bathing is essential to maintain your health.

It's been difficult,lately. The greasiness of three years worth of accumulating  
filth and grime took its toll on the tangled brown strands of Lucrecia's hair. As she pulled it from an equally dirt-covered forehead, she extricated the most bizarre organisms from between knots that she could have easily collected an amply-sized sample  
to conduct her research. But all that dissolved in the solution of her mind that held the concentration of a solitary goal: to find her husband before the Captain and Ms. Lockheart found him.

That is, if he had survived the acid storm. "It's only an assumption.." Lucrecia stated bleakly as she crawled from under the rocky shelter, holstering the weapon at her side and heading for the marked location. "..that concentrated acid affects this..." She stared at the tentacle, unscientifically running her fingers over the hide,  
catching pricks of burn that reminded her it was drenched in acid rain."...exactly as it affects the epidermis.." She took her hand away and turned towards the clouds, finished with the water cycle overrun by acid, released nothing more. Lucrecia thought this would  
bring her relief, but driven by a morose determination, walked on with gravity exceeding Gaia's pull on its children, a weight that seemed to crush her into, or below ground,  
through the mantle, into the core itself.

----  
An ebony worm crawled the length of the treacherous backbone of the Whirlwind Maze. Its folds of hide blew rigidly in the screaming devils' wake, whose crushing breath would force a weaker body off of the jagged cliffs into the waiting maw of oblivion.

Needless to say, the products of Mako/Jenova infusion were anything but weak. In body, at least. Their minds and souls were utterly eliminated, to the point that their vocabulary was reduced to a mere two to five words. Many had lost the ability of speech entirely. And even this was a mindless, soulless drone, a posessed chant, that defined clearly their sole purpose of a predetermined existence.

They were nonentities, known only by their numbers. Except for one.

Cloud found himself trudging amidst the hunched beings, cloaked in black like the

rest of them, following the mechanical drone that suffocated the wind-torn chasm. Cloud tensed. They were following a dim patch of light that had an inescapable grip on him...like before, though this time he was aware of it. This was the Jenova Reunion.

And yet, it was different, somehow. The clones were dead if they were even alive to begin with. Sephiroth hacked them to pieces. Not that his mind hadn't played tricks on him before---hell, his whole LIFE was a trick, so would yet another lie make that big of a  
difference? Heh, six years of unconsciously pretending to be someone else? Someone better than you? Someone that's now dead because of the one that you were supposed to be the clone of?

Cloud was compelled to stop. The incombatable winds died for good. The chants still were audible, but as he stood there, their voices grew distant to the point that Cloud could hear his own breathing, that tensed at the portentous silence. The cells in his bloodstream reacted, ordering him to draw his sword. Also, there was something wrong with the black-cloaked man. The way he dwarfed the other clones, the fact that he had stopped as well. A true clone would plummet off of the precipice had Jenova thrived in the abyss. This clone was like him, a humanoid rather than the hollow semblance of one.

He was soon proved right. The second outstretched a firm hand, unlike the others who were plagued with demons, the man they had failed to best had mastered them. And now this very man revealed himself, driving the blade of the Masamune through the garment and standing imperiously before his self-righteous killer. Battle scars did little to mar the aura of perfection that veiled him with assumed invulnerability, Cloud knew that wasn't true. He and his comrades slaughtered the so-called god and ended the threat of immediate obliteration of the wounded Planet--Meteor would bring it to a slow demise.

Prolonging death. Nothing more.

Sephiroth cleaved the air with an effortless swing, a metallic clash filled the chasm as they crossed swords. Falling sparks trickled from the edges as the blades connected, embers in the empty bleakness of the Whirlwind Maze. There began this deadly dance, a clumsy edge striking the other that was deceptively frail, whose longer reach threatened constantly to pierce the body. The closer to human, the more vulnerable.

On and on Cloud struggled to gain the advantage and gouge his heavy blade into his archnemesis' heart, just like he had done to Aeris.

Aeris...as the blood began to flow, Cloud getting a faceful of the blade, he peered into the Lifestream that bubbled out of a fault in the crust. He heard her voice. HER voice.

"Cloud."

Sephiroth had him down on one knee, the battle deteriorating into a one-way struggle fogged in blood. Cloud forced a rough breath out of his lungs, coming hot and tainted with the blood taste. He brought the sword up and it collided with the Masamune, and the Apocalypse snapped.

"Cloud."

The chunk of metal plunged into the green abyss. From the eerie mist Aeris watched the ex-SOLDIER and cried his name, and it wasn't until Sephiroth pierced him in the gut that the man woke to find it was just a dream and a monotonous semblance of a voice was the reality that impaled the haunting hope of the cry of the dead Ancient.

"Cloud."

A groan from behind the tent flap and the SOLDIER rolled out of the tent, one hand cupped on the back of his head and a paranoid glaze in his Mako-blue eyes as he fell  
foward on his hands and knees. He crawled pitifully out of the tent, letting everything come back into focus, the falsities of the dream dissipating as reality banished it from the strangled atmosphere of Cloud's mind.

He gained his balance on one knee and stood up, the flesh, bone, and metal statue unaffected by the behavior. It was nothing he hadn't seen--or felt, before. But those maddened reactions, those moments of psychotic rage---it had all dissipated to apathy.

The dream beckoned him to the Creator. To the second Reunion. To Sephiroth. But it was more than the dream. He just knew it.  
The cells knew it. The god cast a shadow that enveloped all.

"He's alive," Cloud stated, the full scope of reality not quite having sunk in. His fists  
tightened at his side, and he crawled into the tent and emerged with the Apocalypse which had sheared the feathers and stricken the heads off of fowl for many months:  
pretty soon he would have to use this same weapon to hack off his archnemesis' head. So, heh--- he survived AVALANCHE's assault. Once and for all he had to send the one-winged angel to his death. Before he destroyed what was left of the Planet.  
With frenzied urgency he said,

"We have to get off of Wutai." He shifed the enormous blade on his back, gripping it with one hand. "Sephiroth is alive."

Vincent turned to the cliff's edge, the bronze soles of his shoes clanked on the ridged ground, the spectre-like man moving noiselessly past the red creature that slept with tormented dreams. "Sephiroth is dead," he answered. Three words were more than enough to convey the entirety. No need of embellishment, only a world's empty triumph  
and a monster's demise.

How simple it had become to term it with removed distance. To close his mind to the fact that it was Sephiroth, the child of Lucrecia, that had been killed, the world over waiting expectantly for the one-winged angel to reach his final gasp.

To draw it with a bullet from the Death Penalty.

But Cloud wouldn't hear of the possibility--nay, the truth-- that the one-winged angel was dead. He came to the edge of the precipice and stared out at Wutai's coastline that bore the impact of the pounding force of the ocean on a coastline showing its fraiilty, showing the weight of time and submitting to the aging process.

Age...the life cycle. Every year brought one closer to death. Everything died. Everything faded. He would never fade. Neither would the one who heaved this unshakable burden onto his shoulders. Lifetimes would pass, all would pass out of  
his existence that would continue on into forever.

Who anticipated eternal life..?

What he would trade for mortality..

What he would give to return to the Lifestream.

His unspoken yearnings were broken by the roar of the tumultuous oceans below

coupled with human barks.

"Shin-Ra..." Cloud's Mako eyes flashed with instinctual hostility. The unmistakable uniform that he once wore, of the enemy, an enemy AVALANCHE conquered...and now they crowded onto shore from a grey hulk docked in the distance, moving in unison at  
their commander's orders. A flash of steel gleamed in the dawn's light. Cloud raised the  
sword up over his padded shoulder and held it at the ready: His comrades drew their firearms and bared their fangs. An uncharacteristic haze billowed over the Wutaian shore, obscuring both parties behind the morning's ghosts.  
----  
A/N: Yay! It's done!


End file.
